Taiwan Church News
3408 Edition
19 – 25 June, 2017
Topical News
The Soul-Searching Story Of Vietnam As A Model For Taiwan Independence
Reported by Chen Yi-fan
In June, a series of book launch events were held for the book, Vietnam soul: languages, literature and anti-hegemony, written by Professor Jiang Wei-wen, director of Center for Vietnam Studies at NCKU. Many scholars and emigrant Vietnamese workers in Taiwan were invited to attend the book launch, sharing their thoughts about how Vietnam tried to survive among contentious empires, solved the conundrums left by colonial regimes and built a country with her own unique language and literature.
As a scholar engaged in Vietnam Studies for decades, Professor Jiang remarked that the historical experiences of modern Vietnam could be an inspiring model for Taiwan. He convincingly raised two particular events that Vietnam and Taiwan had in common yet responded in different ways: the first was Chiang Kai-sheik’s planned military occupation of Vietnam under General MacArthur’s order after WWII, which had never been mentioned by any history textbook in Taiwan and it finally failed due to Vietnam’s strong resistance and smart diplomacy; the second was the Romanization of the Chinese characters, while Vietnam did a great success to create her own writing language system, the Romanization of Taiwanese was still treated with a marginalized status in spite of her inception one and a half century ago.
Through a comprehensive investigation into modern Vietnam history in various dimensions, how Chiang Kai-sheik tried to occupy Vietnam but failed at last, the border conflicts between China and Vietnam, the genesis of Vietnam literature, Vietnam’s language policy, the Romanization of the Vietnam language and etc, Professor Jiang concluded in his book that the inspiring self-determination story of the Vietnamese people and her successful Romanization of Vietnamese language were what Taiwan most needed to build a new and independent country!
Translated by Peter Wolfe
