Cultural invasion

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Article in South China Morning Post (9/19/17) by Jasmine Siu:

"Activist fined HK$3,000 for binning Hong Kong public library books in ‘fight against cultural invasion’ from mainland China:  Alvin Cheng Kam-mun, 29, convicted of theft over dumping of books printed in simplified Chinese characters"

A radical Hong Kong activist was on Tuesday fined HK$3,000 for dumping library books in a bin in what he said was an attempt to protect children from the “cultural invasion” of simplified Chinese characters.

Alvin Cheng Kam-mun, 29, had told the court during trial that he had become angry after learning from newspapers that the Hong Kong government had “wasted public funds” to stock the city’s libraries with 600,000 books written in the simplified characters more commonly used in mainland China. Hong Kong uses traditional characters.

Kowloon City Court magistrate Wong Sze-lai, who convicted Cheng of theft, slammed his conduct as “selfish and stupid”, adding that the purpose behind the crime did not matter. She said English folk hero Robin Hood would similarly be found guilty of theft even for robbing the rich to help the poor.

Outside court, Cheng said the conviction made him feel “quite helpless” since he had never held any desire to obtain the property of others yet had been found guilty of an offence involving dishonesty.

He did not comment on whether he would continue his campaign against simplified characters, save for saying: “I hope Hongkongers will cherish and defend our language.”

Cheng, the vice-chairman of localist political party Civic Passion, went to a public library in Ho Man Tin on March 29 last year in the hope of “protecting libraries” and drawing attention to his cause. He filmed himself dumping nine children’s books into a library rubbish bin. The books cost HK$505 in total.

Cheng said that since children would not be able to tell the difference at a young age between the two versions of characters, the simplified books might affect their cognitive learning and confuse them. He also said the “effects and poisonous influences” of such books went beyond just the different shapes on a page.

The recorded stunt was uploaded to his Facebook page, where he called on others to follow suit during his campaign to run for a seat in Hong Kong’s legislature in elections last September.

I have quoted the article extensively because the issues at stake are of such profound importance for the people of Hong Kong that it is best to have as much of the background to the story as possible.  Alvin Cheng Kam-mun was motivated not by greed or dishonesty; his act was one of civil disobedience to the imposition of an alien writing system and mode of thought, using public funds, on the people of Hong Kong, without their consent or consultation.

The matter of what many Hong Kongers viscerally consider to be a degraded writing system pertains to culture and is particularly sensitive since the books were directed toward children at a malleable, formative stage of their life, but it is also linked to potent political issues that have the potential to cause tremendous social conflict.  Indeed, during the past week we have seen the universities of Hong Kong, especially the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), engulfed in controversy and chaos over whether students have a right to put up posters and banners mentioning independence.



9 Comments

  1. Apollo Wu said,

    September 19, 2017 @ 10:24 pm

    Quite different from Singapore which adopted the Simplified Chinese as the medium of teaching, Hong Kong as well as Taiwan still retain the traditional Chinese characters. This sentiment appears to be linked to the fact of large number of mainland people became refugees during and after the 1949 Chinese revolution. These people tend to influence the language usage in their new habitats usually in a conservative mode.

  2. hanmeng said,

    September 19, 2017 @ 10:59 pm

    I imagine many people in Hong Kong don't like pinyin, either.

  3. B.Ma said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 7:05 am

    Pinyin represents the sounds of a foreign language** to most Hong Kong people, so not sure of the relevance of liking or not liking it. Most people pronounce simplified characters in Cantonese.

    Hong Kong people learning Mandarin are quite happy to use pinyin – although zhuyin appears on keyboards.

    A small number of people and businesses choose to Romanize their names with pinyin (i.e. using the Mandarin pronunciation). This often includes immigrants from the mainland, but many also don't appear to have any particular links to the mainland. Also, I sometimes come across people from the mainland who chose to re-Romanize their names into what wikipedia calls Hong Kong Government Romanisation.

    **Albeit the vast majority have been told/taught/brainwashed into believing that the topolects in question are the same language.

  4. ft said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 9:03 am

    > Cheng said that since children would not be able to tell the difference at a young age between the two versions of characters, the simplified books might affect their cognitive learning and confuse them.

    is there some evidence for this, or is it akin to (false) claims that bilingual education harms children?

  5. RP said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 11:44 am

    Is the magistrate being politically subversive and expressing her sympathy for the defendant, by implicitly comparing Hong Kong's governance to that of the notoriously corrupt and unjust system that Robin Hood was reputedly resisting?

  6. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 12:22 pm

    It would be helpful to know whether the books in question also existed in traditional-character editions (or if the HK library system is such a big purchaser that a traditional-character edition would be printed if the library system would buy its fair share of copies), and if not to have a sense of what the library system would have done with the money instead.

    I could see taking the position that no children's library should stock books edited/printed/published on the mainland because the lack of a free press means they should be assumed to be Communist propaganda and thus kept away from readers not old enough to be able to discount for that appropriately. The script variant used would thus be a suggestive clue, but would not itself be the key problem.

    American libraries afaik generally do not try to keep kids away from English-language books published abroad that follow British spelling conventions (or use British lexemes different from their American equivalents), but we are obviously in a position to feel culturally unthreatened by such an "invasion" and trust that any childhood confusion over whether "color" or "colour" is the "right" spelling can be sorted out easily. HK is obviously not in quite so comfortable a position. And of course I could be wrong and maybe there's a story I missed somewhere about some school library trying to purge all Britishly-spelled books from its stacks lest the students get confused by the differences.

  7. Eidolon said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 7:33 pm

    >> Cheng said that since children would not be able to tell the difference at a young age between the two versions of characters, the simplified books might affect their cognitive learning and confuse them.

    > is there some evidence for this, or is it akin to (false) claims that bilingual education harms children?

    There are two problems with what Cheng said. First, the idea that children would not be able to tell the difference at a young age between the two versions of characters seems quite ridiculous to me. Simplified characters are very different from traditional characters, and there is no evidence children cannot tell the difference. Perhaps this argument was lost in translation.

    The other argument – that the availability of books written using the simplified script would confuse children and affect their cognitive learning – rests on several assumptions: that children would read books in both scripts, instead of gravitating towards the script they know; that reading books in both scripts would affect cognitive learning in a negative sense, which I suppose is similar to the bilingual argument; and finally, that the children of Hong Kong should all learn traditional characters, and thus there is no room for simplified character books in Hong Kong's libraries.

    All of these assumptions can be challenged, and I don't think Mr. Cheng is doing himself any favors trying to frame his civil disobedience in a linguistic sense. He is no doubt concerned much more with the gradual erosion of Hong Kong's traditional culture and its replacement by a mainland variety sanctified by Beijing. That is the main thrust behind Hong Kong's localist movement.

  8. Victor Mair said,

    September 20, 2017 @ 8:44 pm

    "…I don't think Mr. Cheng is doing himself any favors trying to frame his civil disobedience in a linguistic sense. He is no doubt concerned much more with the gradual erosion of Hong Kong's traditional culture and its replacement by a mainland variety sanctified by Beijing. That is the main thrust behind Hong Kong's localist movement."

    Traditional characters are a vital part of "Hong Kong's traditional culture".

  9. John Swindle said,

    September 21, 2017 @ 12:47 am

    It's not so much that children will be confused. The problem is that they might not know which set of characters is good and which one is bad. (Ducks, covers head.)

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