Did anyone see this article in the Taipei Times last week?
taipeitimes.com/news/2002/08 … 0000165127
A friend and I were wondering what issues there are… language? cultural differences?
Any thoughts?
Jennifer
Interesting. The TT story has chosen to edit the original story to omit the part where a local education official says there’s talk of segregating these children from the rest of the student body.
I also got the impression that the only reason the segregation idea has not been adopted is because, as the article says, there’ll soon be just so many of these children.
(Incidentally, the highly educated woman who translated that story from the Chinese asked me what term she should use – half-breed or half-caste – I suggested picaninny or mongrel, but she didn’t pick up on the sarcasm 
).
I wonder why the TT ommitted that part, because it seems to me that that raises some far more unpleasant “issues.”
I think the main reason they’re worried, though, is the idea of having to deal with large numbers of Southeast Asian mothers who don’t speak Mandarin and therefore won’t be able to communicate with the school staff
Q&A
Q: In the English language, what is the preferred term to denote two people of different races who are married, without regard to their nationality or country of residence?
A: The term mixed race couple is perhaps most common, although biracial couple, bicultural couple, or intercultural couple are also acceptable terms.
Q: What is the preferred term to denote the child born of a mixed race couple?
A: In many western countries, for a child to have a multicultural background is the rule rather than the exception. However in some other countries, such a child may be viewed as unusual, and may be described as a mixed race child or a biracial child.
Describing a child as half-breed, half-caste, half-blood, mixed-blood, or picaninny is no longer in fashion. (See [i]Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws and Mores of the Western Peoples[/i], published 1803, 5 volumes.)
The word hybrid is used in agriculture, and the word mongrel is used in dog-breeding, but neither is currently in vogue for indicating the heritage (or parentage) of members of the human race. (See [i]Hartzell’s History of Cross Cultural Marriages and Social Adaptation from 2001 B.C. to 2001 A.D.[/i], published 2004, complete in 78 volumes.)
Sorry Richard, I forgot. Hybrid was another one she suggested – after I had told her in no uncertain terms that she couldn’t use half-breed, etc.
Her “hybrid” suggestion was intended by her to be a polite alternative!
Guess she’s never looked at Blackstone’s. 
<<I wonder why the TT ommitted that part, because it seems to me that that raises some far more unpleasant “issues.” >>
Was it at the bottom of the story, or did they cut from the middle? If it was at the bottom it’s no wonder it got cut.
Far as I remember, it was in the third graf, so it looks as if it was a deliberate move. I agree, the woman who wrote the piece has a prodigious “talent” for making 15 grafs do the work of four, but woe betide the poor schmuck who chops her stuff down in THIS office!
Actually, I checked the original with the edited version. The information doesn’t appear in the third graph but toward the bottom. No one here actually cares about any agenda. We cut from the bottom and that’s what the editor did.
Also, it should be noted that it was an official with a teacher’s union that raised the issue of segregation, but a government official at the MOE said that would be unfair.
Below is the whole story as written by CNA’s star reporter Sophia Wu.
Taipei, Aug. 21 (CNA) Eight years after the government’s original “Go South” policy triggered a rush of local men marrying Southeast Asian women, many children born to these couples are expected to enter elementary schools this autumn, education sources said Wednesday.
The ratio of schoolchildren born to Southeast Asian women in some rural and remote regions is likely to reach 20 percent, or even as much as 50 percent, in the next few years, the sources said.
As the island’s current education system has yet to formulate a clear mechanism to cope with the situation, it remains unclear exactly how many of these mixed-race children will enter the school system. However, statistics compiled by the Ministry of the Interior and other relevant government agencies all indicate that this will be a special year in terms of elementary school admissions.
Taiwan began promoting a “Go South” policy in 1994 to encourage businessmen to invest in Southeast Asia. Amid the trend, local manpower agents also started to mediate marriages between Taiwan men and Southeast Asian women and the children born to these couples are now reaching school age.
According to MOI tallies, the number of inter-marriages (not including mainland Chinese spouses) has increased rapidly in recent years. The number was 20,000-plus in 1999, doubling to 41,000 in 2000 and further zooming to more than 60,000 in 2001. These figures also do not include foreign spouses that have already obtained Republic of China citizenship.
Of the marriages registered in the first half of this year, 11 percent involved foreign spouses and more than 90 percent of those foreign spouses were Southeast Asian brides, with Vietnam as the largest source, followed by Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Malaysia.
Based on these figures, the percentage of Taiwan’s newborns with Southeast Asian mothers could reach 10 percent of the total or even higher in the next few years.
The percentage of inter-marriages is even higher in Taiwan’s outlying islands and remote regions. MOI tallies show that inter-marriages accounted for 18.8 percent of all new marriages registered in the offshore island county of Penghu in the first half of this year. The ratio was the second-highest in Miaoli County at 14.87 percent and the lowest in Tainan City at 7.49 percent.
Yeh Tien-chao, president of Chiangchun Elementary School in Penghu County’s Chimei Village, said that if the trend continues, mixed-race students could exceed half of the school’s new recruits in the next two or three years.
Wu Chung-tai, secretary-general of the Taiwan Schoolteachers Association, said that although many Southeast Asian brides have lived in Taiwan for more than five years, their Chinese speaking and reading abilities and their understanding of Taiwan’s education system remain limited.
“As the families into which they marry are mostly in the lower scale of Taiwan society, they may need more assistance from local educational authorities in terms of family education and coordination with schools,” Wu said, adding that he feels disappointed that education administrators at local and central levels have not yet paid due attention to relevant problems.
Officials with the Ministry of Education’s Elementary Education Department said assistance to foreign brides should be handled by the Ministry of the Interior. They also noted that mixed-race schoolchildren should not be separated from the other children, in order to prevent discrimination.
According to a rough estimate by the MOE’s Social Education Department, the number of foreign brides is presently about 100,000, only one-seventh of whom have attended literacy classes sponsored by various local elementary schools.
With foreign brides becoming Taiwan’s largest new immigrant group over the past half-century, Vice Minister of Education Fan Sun-lu said the ministry will step up adult education programs to allow the women to segue more efficiently into their lives in Taiwan.
In the future, Fan said, elementary schools’ adult education programs will be designed in terms of the demand from foreign brides. “Parent-children relations, child education, relations with local in-laws, Taiwan’s culture and social customs will all be major subjects of those programs,” Fan explained, adding that Penghu’s Chiangchun Elementary School will also open an adult education class with foreign brides as its main targets. (By Sofia Wu)
Taiwanese schools are secretly implementing a Chinese-only eugenic program. If this mentality even continues, then it is eugenics in practice, and it is dangerous.
Care to elaborate on that? I only ask because your statement seems to fly in the face of all the evidence. Or are you simply trolling? That’s the kind of thing taiwanstatus would have done. 
No silly elaborations are needed as it is just probably a vocal minority of school teachers. But it is a problematic minority of closed-minded educators. I’d only say any such Chinese teachers in favor of segregation should be wearing dunce caps.
Demographically, the impact is starting to look like America.
There is an interesting article in the Economist this week on the USA vs EU and the role of immigration and birthrates.
If its a “vocal minority,” how can it be “secret.” And how can it be “a program?”
And what’s [quote]Demographically, the impact is starting to look like America[/quote] supposed to mean?
And where does it say… oh, never mind
Wouldn’t mind a link to the Economist article, though, if you have one.
The TT article doesn’t really say anything on chauvanistic Chinese “eugenics” but the earlier posts have commented on segregation opinions of some Chinese in Taiwan. It is not out of line for some to think this way in Taiwan society, so there is really merit to warding off such stupid opinions.
Remember, the MOI immigration officials have also publicly commented on how ARC foreigners are a pollution to the Taiwan gene pool, too.
The Economist has a news article which is not linkable but the recent cover has a pregnant Statue of Liberty and a beer-bellied Old Man (EU) on the cover. It is predicted that the new linear projections on rising US birthrates means the USA will have between 400,000 to 500,000 citizens by 2040. The median age of workers is going to dramatically shift downward while the EU is going to shift towards older. The floodgate of US immigration has been a notable part of the trend reversing but there has been a concurrent rate spike in white/black rates, too. So demographically, latte skin is the wave of the future in the US and the schools are already full of 33-50% “latte” students under age 14. In the EU, however, the geriatric welfare state is going to bust the socialist system by 2040-50, unless there is a trend reversal by natives in the next decade. The article extrapolations for future ramifications included geopolitical issues and the discretionary incomes of the average 1/3rd wealthier American consumer (than the any 300,000 EU country-cousin consumers) could make the 1 billion Chinese paupers lose their megamarket luster in the coming years.
Half a billion “wealthy” American consumers are far more lucrative than any number of Chinese peasants. Taiwan should rethink their political future with China especially because of a rapid demographic shift in their schools. Perhaps just like their mascot, the dodo bird, the Han Chinese on Taiwan is an endangered species. Those mixed-race children are called “Americans”, if they have civil rights by the SFPT.
The Economist article is here
The Economist leader on the demography issue is available to subscribers only here
An excerpt from the leader:
[quote]The most important aspect (of projected American population increases), though, can be summed up in one word: youth. While Europe’s population will, on average, be ageing, America’s will stay much younger. That will increase the burden of education spending, but reduce the burden of pensions and health care for the elderly, especially towards the middle of the century. A younger population is likely to mean lower labour costs (as it did, for example, for Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, when its workforce was younger than America’s) and, most likely, a more entrepreneurial culture.
In other words, you ain’t seen nothing yet. These trends suggest that anyone who assumes the United States is now at the zenith of its economic or political power is making a big mistake. [/quote]
Very interesting. Thanks to whoever posted the original article. I can understand the concerns now, because we have a little bit of difficulty ourselves communicating with our son’s teacher–lots of help from the other parents and my husband’s coworkers in translating simple documents.
Jennifer
Duh, I shoulda looked before I said it wasn’t linkable… 
The wave of the future is in the schools already. Do you really want them to be returned to China or taught by a clique of creatively-challenged Chinese teachers?
U.S. population increase will come first from Mexico, and after that from various Asian countries.
The biggest group will be poor third-world laborers. They will raise inter-ethnic tensions to unheard-of degrees. Not just whites vs. minorities, either–probably blacks and Mexicans will go after each other first.
None of these people will care about old white people. Nor will the old white people care about immigrants or their children. The groups will struggle for political control of a few key states. Losing groups will tend to migrate to other states in which they are a majority–maybe very quickly, like Yugoslavia.
Chinese are in a different category altogether. They’re like Jews–they do business with each other, form cartels, etc. (Eventually the Jews will notice this, and try to keep them out.)
Difference is, there is a potentially neverending supply of Chinese. If too many of them get their relatives in, they will eventually take over a big chunk of America’s political machinery, and our descendents will be as you said, mongrels. Or Mongols.
Now all this assumes that immigration continues as now. But if enough whites become politically radicalized soon enough, they might yet succeed in preserving their children’s inheritance.
What about the inheritance of the Native Americans? Good thing they didn’t “radicalize” huh?
Do you have a problem with Chinese, Jews, etc? Your post reads that way. One example is your words about Chinese “getting their relatives in”. Many Americans don’t realize just what immigrants contribute to the American economy by starting businesses, creating jobs and paying taxes. A lot of those foreigners have a better work ethic than many Americans… they know what it’s like to be hungry and have no shoes.
You mentioned how Chinese (“like Jews”) do business with eachother… that’s nothing new. It’s not just the Chinese and Jews, Koreans, Japanese, even Americans do it. Christians support Christian businesses, mother-owned businesses do it, I even saw on a list recently that pagan family only buys from pagan-owned businesses. Many people buy only American and that’s a good thing… no different from supporting other people in businesses who share your values.
I’m guessing you are a white American. So what is a white American man doing in Taiwan, working in Taiwan, paying Taiwan taxes if he wants to preserve the inheritance of American children? Maybe you need a fresh start? Perhaps those immigrants to the US could use a fresh start too.
Just Jennifer
Brown-skinned American with a Chinese Name
We need more mongrels. Go mongrels!
Can Taiwan accept the “mongrolization” of their schools?
The Chinese scholars have researched the reason the US gained hegemony rather than them, and their conclusion was the Bubonic Plague around the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. It most interestingly seems that with over 25% of the entire burdensom population reduced, the resulting inheritance of land was a boon to farming productivity. With the agarian society experiencing the biggest asset transfers in history, the stage of prosperity was set for the growth of European expansionism. Ultimately, the underlying reason the USA rose to hegemonic heights of the present era. So with the US now experiencing the biggest asset transfer in history, where does this leave China with its AIDS epidemic?
The Bubonic Plague of our times must be CIA conspiracy!!
Or is it a new 10 year plan called the Great Leap Forward: Part Deux! Jiang Zemin is a very brilliant estate planner and should retained as Chairman of the Central Economic Planning Commission!! He singlehandedly foiled the CIA plots against Chinese hegemony!!
Mongrels are hot! Being relatively purebred myself, I intend to do my best to halt 800 years of documented inbreeding and mix up the gene pool a little for the next generation. Too bad that blue eyes are a recessive gene, though… On the other hand, my kids probably won’t get sunburned quite as easily as I do! 