As this goes to press, people in Free China are vying with each other to show their welcome and hospitality to members of the Singapore-Malaya Trade Mission. Under the leadership of Mr. Lim Keng Lian, most of the sixty-three members of the mission are businessmen and industrialists; but there are also a few journalists and men from other walks of life. Formerly, visitors from Singapore and Malaya were mostly our own nationals, but this time a number of them are native sons of the two places. Therefore, it is all the more fitting that they should be accorded our utmost hospitality.
Trade between Free China and the two places is not large. Last year our exports to them totaled US$9,000,000 and our imports from them, US$3,000,000. However, a small part of the trade might have been routed through Hong Kong and thus lost in the accounting. There is hope that as a result of the visit of the mission, the total for the two-way trade between Taiwan and these places may be jacked up to US$20,000,000. Even if this goal is reached, however, the amount would still be modest. It must be noted in this connection that products of a free economy such as that of Free China's cannot stand competition with goods from the Chinese mainland which are manufactured by slave labor. Therefore, we would not be surprised if members of the mission should not find good buys at give-away prices here, as some of those who have been to the Chinese mainland might have found there. These might have been offered for one political purpose or another, a thing which neither the government nor the people here are prepared to do.
Whatever effect their visit may have on trade, members of the mission will no doubt find their visit to Taiwan profitable. For as both Singapore and Malaya are going to win their statehood soon, one of the first problems the two new states have to face will be Communist subversion. Though members of the mission are not concerned with government and politics, there is no doubt that what they will do and say after their return home will have a good deal of influence on their homo governments. Here in Taiwan we have outlawed the Communists without affecting the basic freedoms of the people. We believe in democracy and freedom; but we have learned that, unless the Communists are outlawed, both will be utilized as a shield and a weapon by them to fight against the government. Let us hope that members of the mission will make a study of what we are doing here and bring home with them a message which may be of immense importance for the future of their two countries.
Surrender of the Philippine Huks
Latest news dispatches from Manila have it that President Carlos P. Garcia declared that he would reject any offer of conditional surrender by the Communist leader, Dr. Jesus Lava, and that the latter would have to stand trial for all the crimes he might have committed aside from being a member of a subversive organization. In the light of China's experience with its Communist rebels, President Garcia was eminently right in his action, which is no doubt based on the rich store of experience the Philippine government had in its dealings with the Communist Huks.
Both the Chinese and the Philippine experiences with Communist rebels show that the only good Communist is a dead one, and that a negotiating Communist is the most treacherous. When he is cornered, when all roads of escape are cut off, the Communist will offer to negotiate for a surrender in order to buy time, to wait for reinforcement or to make good an escape, and to seek clemency from the attackers. Anyone who thinks he should be big-hearted enough to show the cornered Communist clemency will do so at a great risk to himself. For when the table is turned, when the former victor falls into the power of the Communist he has reprieved, he can expect no mercy.
If it is so hazardous in dealing with individual Communists, it is vastly more so in a government's dealing with the Communist Party. The latter, wherever found, is out to overthrow the legal government with the assistance of international Communists under the direction of the Soviet imperialists. Any government which tolerates the existence of the Communist Party will one day be overthrown by it or have to fight against it for its own existence. All this means that the Communists are incompatible with free governments. And that any government which is engaged in fighting Communists is well advised to prosecute its war with determination and with the single objective of exterminating their leadership. Not until this is done, not until victory over the Communist enemy is total should there be any negotiation or letup in the attack or pressure applied.
Modernization Vital to Industrialization
A lot of things need to be done in our march toward industrialization. The most important of these is no doubt the choice of capital equipment. Most investors in a new industry would like to build their plant for the future. They would like to think that the product manufactured by them would remain to be the most up-to-date of its kind for a number of years to come. Unfortunately, many industrialists in this country do not realize the importance of acquiring or do not possess the resources to acquire the latest information on the line of products they want to manufacture. As a result some factories are obsolete even before they are ready to start production.
There are also factories which manufacture essential commodities for the public that have a more or less monopolistic character, and because of protective tariff and the absence of competition, they are content to go on using obsolete equipment and manufacturing an interior line of goods, resting assured that whatever they put out will be absorbed by the public. One such instance is the line of electric supplies and accessories manufactured and sold on this island. They are years behind those produced in America or Europe. We need only mention the electric bulbs, the glass part of which easily parts company with the metal socket. Whoever manufactures such an inferior line of important daily goods exposes its users to great danger and should be required to modernize its equipment or close shop.
The government is doing a good deal to help industries, either through direct loans or other facilities, or through American aid. Prior to extending assistance to them, it would do well to insist on their modernizing the existing equipment. A sound policy would be to require the manufactures applying for foreign exchange to order their machinery only from highly advanced industrial countries such as the United States or Germany and refrain from making purchases in industrially backward countries though consideration of cost and freight may be in favor of the latter. In the long run such policy will payoff, for it will obviate the possibility that our manufactures would be unwanted even by ourselves.
Chinese Is a Living Language
Peiping's recent announcement that it has abandoned its efforts to romanize the Chinese characters has come as no surprise to those who have followed the Chinese Communists' language reform movement in recent years. They knew that the Communists would sooner or later give up.
In fact, if the Chinese Communists had not been so goaded by a need to make political capital out of what is primarily a matter for academic research, they would not have tackled something in which they knew very well they could never succeed. In other words, they should never have tried to replace China's monosyllabic language with an alphabet.
For any language to be in continuous use for hundreds of years, there must be certain strong factors. One is that it must be a living language, capable of growing with the needs of the times. Chinese is such a language. There is no valid reason to do away with it, unless there is a political consideration, which the Chinese Communists certainly have. Probably because of their class consciousness, they have an instinctive dislike for the Chinese language in its existing form. They would just as soon see it replaced by all alphabet so that everybody would start from the scratch.
In trying to abolish the extant Chinese written language, the Communists have laid themselves wide open to the charge of seeking to destroy what has been an integral part of China's national heritage. This is treason of the first order.
It may be recalled that the Chinese Communists held a so-called Chinese Written Language Reform Conference in October, 1955. The conference produced a draft plan for the simplification of the Chinese written language and also a resolution advocating the further popularization of Putunghua as the Chinese spoken language, both as preparatory steps to the eventual elimination of the Chinese written language as it stands today and replacing it with an alphabetic system instead. Behind this movement lurks a conspiracy to kill the Chinese written language.
Now contrary to popular impressions, the Chinese written language is a dynamic system. It had its genesis some 3,500 years ago. Since then it has gone through a succession of modifications made necessary by the changes in the Chinese people's mode and tempo of life. Down the centuries it has absorbed new ideas and created new characters. Many of its new characters, particularly scientific terms, are borrowed from the Western languages. This goes to show that the Chinese written script is far from being a dead one, despite what the Chinese Communists have said about it.
The Chinese language derives its present form through six different methods. The two principal ones are hieroglyphics and ideograpics. The former suggests a picture while the latter gives the idea. A Chinese character ordinarily is composed of two parts, a radical to indicate the meaning and a phonetic to give the sound. Thus by looking at a character for the first time, one usually can not only pronounce it but also guess at its meaning. Through the combination of strokes, the possibilities are literally inexhaustible.
Another good thing about the Chinese language is that its nouns are not bound by numbers and genders and its verbs are devoid of any restrictions to indicate tenses. Such things as assigning a gender even to inanimate things as is the case in French, and assigning a number to each noun and a tense to each finite verb as is the case in English are unknown in the Chinese language.
It is an undeniable fact, however, that the Chinese language by virtue of its large number of characters, has not been easy to learn or write. An ordinary Chinese dictionary for use by high school students, for instance, contains no fewer than 10,000 characters, all of which have to be committed to memory separately. The Kang Hsi Dictionary, compiled during the reign of Emperor Kang Hsi of the Manchu Dynasty early in the 18th Century, has a total of 47,000 characters between its covers. But not every Chinese need or can be a scholar. For an average person, he can get along fairly well if he has a vocabulary of 10,000 characters. For others, a knowledge of 5,000 characters might suffice.
Nevertheless, the problem posed by the large number of characters in the Chinese language has been long recognized. After the Chinese Renaissance Movement of 1919, much thought has gone into the matter of simplifying the written script in order to make it easier to read and write. A phonetic system containing 36 single and 22 compound phonetics as an aid to correct pronunciation was worked out almost there decades ago. Today it is in use in Taiwan's primary schools. There bas also been a steady endeavor to simplify the characters by reducing the number of their strokes. For it is no joke if one has to make as many as 39 individual strokes with a pen before he has a whole character. What needs to be pointed out is that in neither case, i.e., the introduction of a phonetic system and the simplification of characters, can the Chinese Communists claim any credit, as both were started long before they came into the picture.
Then years ago there was a movement to popularize what was known as the One Thousand Characters. Although by force of sheer necessity it did not exactly stop at the 1000th character, the idea has proved to be a sound one. The man identified with this movement is Dr. James Yen of the Mass Education fame. The system was first tried out before the war in Tinghsien in North China with commendable results. In a way it resembled the Basic English movement which Sir Winston Churchill and others have tried to propagate. In neither case was there any intention to destroy the existing language form. On the contrary, both represent a conscientious effort to reduce words and expressions of daily usage to a small number of really basic ones.
For some reason or other, nowadays one no longer hears much about the One Thou sand Characters movement. Chinese educational authorities on Taiwan should look into the matter and unless there are strong reasons against its revival, it should be followed up with a view to perfecting the system for large-scale adoption on the Chinese main land later on. (In Taiwan where the percent age of literacy is already high, there is no urgent need to use this system as a tool against illiteracy.)
Meanwhile, as to the simplification of the Chinese characters, the same authorities will do well to enlist the services of all Chinese specialists to work on this problem and periodically announce their recommendations for free acceptance by the people. The fact that the Chinese Communists have also done some spade work on this aspect of the problem in recent years need not prejudice the undertaking of a similar project here in Free China. The Chinese Communists could not help injecting political implications into everything they touch. There is no reason for a negative approach here.
The question of language reform should begin and end as a matter for academic research. This is where the Chinese Communists have made a mistake, and this is where people in Free China can make a substantial contribution to the preservation of the Chinese culture which we all hold dear.
The Hungarian People Don't Forget
When the United Nations General Assembly reconvenes in September, one of the first items on its agenda should be to look into the Hungarian situation and consider the report submitted by the U. N. Special Committee which investigated the Hungarian revolt of last year. Nearly a year has passed since the Russian tanks and armed forces shot their way into Budapest and other cities in Hungary leaving in their wake thousands of Hungarians killed and wounded, incalculable state and private property destroyed and large numbers of young men and young women deported to Russia. All this was done to a proud people just because it wanted to be free.
If the United Nations had functioned properly, that is, if it had worked according to its Charter, it would have called a stop to the Soviet military actions in Hungary right when they were first started, sent an investigation committee to the spot, helped the Hungarians to establish a popularly elected government, and required the Russians to repatriate all the deported Hungarian citizens and make adequate reparations.
Because of the obstruction tactics employed by the Soviet representatives to the United Nations and those of the Soviet satellites, this was not done. Instead, valuable time was lost through debating on non-essentials, allowing the Soviet representatives to side track the issue. When finally a Special Committee composed of five nations-Australia, Ceylon, Denmark, Tunisia and Uruguay—as voted, it was refused entry into Hungary by the Soviet - sponsored Kadar government. The best the Committee could then do was to gather what information it could in Austria and other neighboring countries of Hungary on the basis of which and on testimonies taken from more than a hundred, witnesses, it drew up a copious report of two thousand pages. Though far from what would be desired, the report gives a fail appraisal of the conditions in Hungary before, during and after the unsuccessful revolution and serves as a severe condemnation of the Soviet government and the Kadar regime. The wantonness of the Soviet armed forces may be witnessed from the following excerpt of the report:
"The Soviet troops undertook a number of punitive sorties in the side streets, killing many non-combatants and destroying many buildings. During these attacks, the Committee was told, the Soviet troops would shoot indiscriminately at anything, even if it were not a legitimate target. Examples described to the Committee included a bread line of women and children, standing outside a bakery, which was shot on 4 November. On 7 November a Red Cross ambulance was destroyed by machine gun fire; the wounded and the nurses in it were killed."
The findings of the Committee give the lie to the Soviet accusation that the uprising was fomented by reactionary elements in Hungary and engineered by Western imperialists, because from start to finish, it was led by students, workers, soldiers and intellectuals, many of whom were Communists or former Communists. Furthermore, heavily armed "Fascists" and "saboteurs" could not have succeeded in landing on Hungarian airfields which were under Soviet supervision, or in crossing the Austrian frontier where there was a closed zone.
The report also shows that the uprising was not a planned movement but the result of spontaneous action of the people. On the other hand, as early as October 20, or three days before the uprising was to start, the Soviet authorities had already taken steps to make armed intervention in Hungary possible in case of necessity.
That the Hungarian problem should properly be dealt with by the United Nations there is little question. But for anyone who has qualms about the United Nations' competency in discussing the matter, the Committee has the following answer:
"In the light of the extent of foreign intervention, consideration of the Hungarian question by the United Nations was legally proper and, moreover, it was requested by a legal government of Hungary. In the matter of human rights, Hungary has accepted specific international obligations in the treaty of peace. Accordingly, the Committee does not regard objections based on Paragraph 7 of Article 2 of the Charter as having validity in the present case. A massive armed intervention by one power on the territory of another, with the avowed intention of interfering with the internal affairs of the country must by the Soviets' own definition of aggression be a matter of international concern."
With the legality for the consideration of the Hungarian problem thus established, members of the United Nations should proceed boldly to take actions commensurate with the seriousness of the Soviet actions. By many people, the Hungarian question has by now been all but forgotten. But by the ten million Hungarians whose friends and relatives were shot down by Russian guns, whose families were broken by deportations of the bread-winning members to Siberia and whose very life is hounded and made unbearable by the stooges that the Russians left behind, the bloodshed and carnage of last year caused and committed by the Soviets in their country can never be for gotten. If Secretary Dulles' remark that Communism is but a "passing phase" is true, then the Hungarians have reason to expect liberation and deliverance from Soviet oppression. The least the United Nations can do is to pass a formal resolution condemning the savageness of the Soviet actions and to secure the return of the deportees to their homes in their unhappy country and adequate compensation for the carnage perpetrated by the Soviets.
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TSENG TSE KILLS THE PIG
Tseng Tse's wife went to the market. Her son followed crying. "Go home," she told him. "When I come home, I'll kill the pig for you." When she returned from the market, Tseng Tse wanted to catch the pig and kill it. "I was only fooling the child," his wife said, stopping him. "We should not fool him," said Tseng Tse. "He has no knowledge of his own and expects to learn from his parents. He will listen to his parents' teachings and directions. When you fooled him, you taught him to cheat. For parents to cheat their children is to teach them not to believe in their parents. This will defeat the purpose of teaching." The pig was therefore killed and cooked. —Han Fei Tse