Wouldn’t that make a great slogan? For getting rid of the Min-Guo system and replacing it with the Gregorian?
Why is this important? For one thing, Min-Guo is annoying and parochial, like the royal year dates used Nepal or Japan. The only other country which agrees that this is the year 92 is… (wait for it)
North Korea.
(There it’s called the “Juche” (“Self-Reliance” / “Kim-worship”) Calendar, and also commemorates the fall of the Ch’ing Dynasty.)
For another, it would represent a way of distancing Taiwan from its KMT era, without exascerbating relations with China as a result. (China already uses the Western calendar, having adopted it as a no doubt logical consequence of believing in godless Communism.)
And just think of the cool posters they could make for this! Happy Jesuses beckoning MRT passengers or blowing out the candles on a birthday cake or something.
How does adopting a Christian calendar follow from having a “godless” political system?
I think the “Jesus” line is a poor marketing point for the Western calendar. It would tend to provoke reactions against it as a foreign cultural invasion. The other religious groups would be up in arms asking why we should adopt “their” calendar. Modernisation, globalisation, convenience and compatiblility are much better selling points.
They should have taken care of this when there was all the hoopla about “Y2K.” As long as you’ve got to mess with the computer systems, might as well fix some other things while you’re at it.
The next big good excuse (thus real chance) for a changeover to the international system will come in less than 10 years, when the ROC runs into possible “Y1C” problems at the changeover from year 99 to year 100.
I have long advocated a base ten calendar. With ten months a year, ten weeks a month, ten day a week, ten hours a day. It will happen some day. It is the purpose of my life.
I see what you mean. But isn’t a year fixed by how long it takes the earth to go round the sun sensible ? That way, the seasons happen at the same time each year. You’re looking at a thousand day year, which, er, is too much for my poor brain this morning…
I think that in the interests of harmony the world should adopt a common calendar with year zero being some mutually agreeable point in the past.
As ‘civilization’ is supposed to have arisen approximately 5000 years ago would it really inconvenience anyone to simply add 3000 to the current date and make this year 5003?
At the same time we could tackle the time issue too. Why can’t everyone set their clocks to GMT, sorry ‘UST’, so that we never again have to ask “What time is it in your country now?”
Just a simple “What time are you available?” with the answer being in 24hr format would solve a lot of confusion. Just mak sure that your business hours are on your card, letterhead, email or whatever and the world will know when to contact you.
If Taiwan called this year 2003 everyone would confuse Taiwan with China. Calling it 92 is much better, then Taiwan can isolate itself from the rest of world (except North Korea)
I suggest midnight of January 1, 1970. This is the standard era start for UNIX. As long as we change to 64-bit computing within the next hundred years, we will be fine for a long time.
Taiwan will have a new calendar that begins at year 1… the day of the formal declaration of independence from China (guessing somewhere around 2014 Jesus Time).
- but…