Is Taiwan getting away from Chinese traditions & culture ?

It's worth creating a new forum topic...

Many years ago, a girl I met from University went to Taiwan to improve her Chinese language skills.
One day she wrote to me complaining that Taiwanese people were losing knowledge of Chinese traditions. Too many McDonald all around, people trying to speak English and not Chinese to her...
Please discuss & bring examples.

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ps416 wrote: I'm digressing from the main post but while we're talking about Taiwan.. Does anyone feel like Taiwan decided to walk away from many cultural practices when they separated from China decades ago. I mean.. even older generations don't know or practice many cultural norms I'd expect most Chinese to know. Recently, a cousin of mine got married to a Taiwanese girl and no one from the girl's side seem to know or had much experience with wedding rituals and practices Chinese people follow. These are traditions I come across at every Chinese wedding I've been to. At first, I assumed it was only the younger generation but older people in their 60's didn't seem to know it either.

Didn't they legalize gay marriage?

i think taiwanese love japan
anyway i remember one celebrity "Jimmy Lin"
hong kong - taiwan - korea - japan
it was a cultural route in the past
such as the silk road
for reference korea's first foreigner cf model was Chow Yun Fat

i dont know. taiwan was an empty and wild island about 600 years ago. the native aboriginals were native taiwan people. they were not han chinese.

taiwanese today are heritages of han chinese， hybride of chinese and japanese and hybrid of native taiwan aboriginals. and okyinawa is not belong to japan. china will help it to get independence.

the mother of ex president of taiwan is japanese. how they could keep chinese tradition ？ taiwan already lost its strategic value to china.

I think it's Taiwan's way of creating the sense of independence - going away from Chinese traditions, and turning more into the West (the US to be more specific). And we can't forget that they were colonized by Spain, Holland, and Japan, so the external forces had as big impact on their culture as China's.
But then again, they still use traditional Chinese (even though China changed it into simplified long time ago), they still follow most of the Confucian legacy, etc.
And I don't know where your friend was staying in, but there are a lot of foreigners in Taipei who can actually speak fluent Chinese. And almost everyone expect us to speak Chinese here - they won't speak English to me unless I'll ask them to.
I guess it depends on how one is perceiving Taiwan - as an independent country or as a part of China - if one do the second thing, he/she will most likely compare those two countries. And then they'll find out, just as your friend did, that those countries are quite different.

kara_g89 wrote: I think it's Taiwan's way of creating the sense of independence - going away from Chinese traditions, and turning more into the West (the US to be more specific). And we can't forget that they were colonized by Spain, Holland, and Japan, so the external forces had as big impact on their culture as China's.
But then again, they still use traditional Chinese (even though China changed it into simplified long time ago), they still follow most of the Confucian legacy, etc.
And I don't know where your friend was staying in, but there are a lot of foreigners in Taipei who can actually speak fluent Chinese. And almost everyone expect us to speak Chinese here - they won't speak English to me unless I'll ask them to.
I guess it depends on how one is perceiving Taiwan - as an independent country or as a part of China - if one do the second thing, he/she will most likely compare those two countries. And then they'll find out, just as your friend did, that those countries are quite different.

Taiwan is a big melt pot being dominated Chinese culture and language now. Japanese people interrupted its purity blood pool. So, China will help Okinawa of Japan to get independence. Because many people in Okinawa have more Chinese blood than Taiwanese.

Yes, my family is from TW, and I can attest to the fact that McD's, Kpop/Jpop/Apop have pretty much kicked tradition to the curb

stylish malls/ restaurants/ racing around is pretty much what we young people care about

I feel obliged to comment because i have family in Taiwan but I was born and grew up in the States. I am not what they call "Taiwanese", but rather connected because of location from my parent's youth. Taiwanese people DO NOT try to speak english over chinese and you can check that out just by going there or even listening to news. That is probably just a minority. English is taught even in China because it is THE universal language. Taiwan has its own drama and so does China. Saying Taiwan has less Chinese blood than Japan is just pitiful ignorance talk. Most of Taiwan are filled with China born individuals who went there to live to adopt democracy or simply just went there to escape communism. Taiwan in my opinion is not much different than Chinese, that is why I refer to myself as Chinese most of the time. There are a large part of Taiwan in which they refer to themselves as only Taiwanese. I do not like these people, but that is their own opinion.

Mandarin is still the most popular....last time I checked, this is the universal Chinese language. Then, their NATIVE dialect is Taiwanese. This is just like cantonese, shanghainese, fuzhunese, and much more.

To say that Taiwan has lost chinese culture and tradition applies to all NEW age asian people. What type of Chinese culture do you want to preserve? Foot binding? Male dominance and lack of sexual equality? Strict and sometimes unreasonable punishment and rules?

I believe that what traditions are good should be kept, like loyalty, respect, and honor. Last time I checked, Chinese people are lacking these. No better than Korean people and Japanese people because the majority of them still show high respect for their elders and family.

The factor of your arguments is called GLOBALIZATION. If you want to blame anyone, blame America. But can you? Can you blame the world for evolving and not living in the past?

Taiwanese people are fighting for their independence, I think they already have it and are misguided by this over their own native issues.

Politics in Taiwan are messed up because they hate each other. That is bad.

There are bad and good to every country.

Please don't be so ignorant to judge a country as a whole when you don't know the majority and stereotype with such arrogant words.

Chinese culture and tradition is only a biased selection of officials and intellectuals. Traditions are invented and officials and intellectuals buried Chinese culture in oblivion to promote their version of monolithic national culture.

Usually mass culture is excluded from institutional recognition. Average people mentality is formed by dime novels, folk festival, hit songs, religion and superstition. Institution teached a phantasy of Chinese past and you internalized this perspective. Nation must create a phantasy identity to promote cooperation among citizen and civil virtue against foreign invasion.

The contribution of J-Pop, K-Pop and Canto-Pop is that they create a sense of Asianess and promote a way of common feeling for Asian Pacific nations. It creates multiple ways for people to people communication. And the best about it, it connects us with Japanese Brazilians, Chinese Thais,Chinese Indonesians, British Koreans...I do not think this is possible if we insist on the superiority of Chinese high culture over over national cultures.

I think the way forward is to promote a pop culture version of Chineseness in a similar way the British do it with Cool Britain, the Japanese do it with the Manga culture and the Irish do it with Irish folk songs and backed it with an institutional ecology of producer and distributor networks all over the world.

This pop culture must include positive image of postcolonial societies in Latin America, Middle East, Central Asian nations, South Asian nations and African nations to communicate that we think of them as people with capabilities - unlike the West.

White pop culture have a disturbing habit to misuse of non-white people as accessory as inherent primitive, poor, miserabel. Look at this example:



India, China, Cuba and the Soviet Union have a hard time to support the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement to fight the Western powers in white South Africa. But the job is still not finished - there are still African nations economically and politically enslaved by Western powers.

We should rethink our historical narratives and imagine a new Manifest Destiny for Asian Pacific nations as anti-colonial powers and help People Of Color around the world to get ahead.

i have noticed that Many People in Taiwan want to join in China today.