Taiwan human rights group says current Chinese written characters for

Taiwan human rights group says current Chinese written characters for 'Jews' are biased

By Dan Bloom, WJNA Correspondent in Taiwan.

TAIPEI -- The Chinese language is comprised of thousands of characters and combinations of characters, each composed with various strokes. It's not an easy language for foreigners to learn to speak, and it's not an easy language to write. What does this have to do with Jews? Well, a human rights group in Taiwan recently called on Chinese journalists and academics worldwide to stop what has been called the "discriminatory" way the characters for "Jewish people" are currently written in Mandarin worldwide. "There are many Chinese characters for 'you-tai' or Jew, but the combination that is currently being used refers to an animal of the monkey species, and has the connotation of `parsimoniousness," Chien Hsi-chieh, director of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan, told reporters at a recent press conference in Taipei. His remarks, complete with illustrations of the offending characters and the new characters Chien recommends, were widely reported in the Chinese-language media across Taiwan and China, both in print and online. "A better choice for the word 'Jews' in Chinese writing would be one
that is pronounced the same, but written with a more neutral character."

Following the press conference held in a meeting room in Taiwan's Parliament, a local English-language newspaper quoted Zhou Xun, a Chinese professor at the University of London, as saying it is not easy to define Jews as a people using a combination of two or three Chinese characters. "In fact, the current way of writing 'you-tai', to mean 'Jews,' indicates the imagined physical difference between the Chinese and the Jews, which is rooted in the tradition of picturing all alien groups living outside the pale of Chinese society as distant savages hovering on the edge of bestiality," the Chinese scholar said. Chien first brought the matter to the attention of the Taiwan government last October, where it was discussed by officials in Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Government Information Office. The government said that it would help promote the new way of writing the term for Jews in books, newspapers and on the Internet if local civic groups, such as the Peacetime Foundation, continued to promote the idea. However, since the island nation of Taiwan has no official diplomatic ties with Israel, due to pressure from communist China, there have been contacts with Jerusalem about the matter, Chien said. The Jewish people are not the only ones that the Chinese written language discriminates against, Chien added. He also recommended that the Chinese world community -- in Taiwan, in China, and in Chinese communities overseas -- replace the currently negative term for Islam ("hui") with a better combination of characters ("yi-si-lan") because the current term has "a connotation of paganism". According to the foundation in Taipei, the origin of the Chinese term used for "Jews" can be dated to around 1830 when Christian missionaries in mainland China were translating the Old and New Testaments and chose the current, discriminatory combination of characters. Chien believes that while there were many other characters the missionaries could have chosen to use in the Chinese writing system, they "purposefully chose the one with character root that means 'dog' which brought with it a centuries-old Christian prejudice against Jews." As an aside, the foundation also notes that near the end of the Qing Dynasty in China, there was so much anger against English colonizers there that it was common to see the Mandarin characters for England with a ''dog'' character root as well. This character root was later cast aside, however.

Chien hopes that on September 21, 2005 -- World Peace Day -- the current way of writing "Jews" in Chinese script will be changed, in order to reflect a more progressive and neutral attitude in looking at all peoples.