Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Please read the rest of the comment. I was assuming that what is called "Traditional Chinese" is used in China, based on its name (Chinese) and that GTranslate outputs it. Urdu and Tamil aren't spoken in China and isn't what GTranslate outputs when you select a Chinese language, afaik

View on HN

Bear in mind that Taiwan (the country) also calls itself China, and so did the rest of the world until the seventies.

What do people living in Taiwan call the 'other' China? Is "mainland China" a correct thing to say, or is the word "main" there implying that Taiwan is lesser and not an equal/peer state?

I used the word China in other comments because I didn't know what to call it otherwise, hoping that in the context of Taiwan it is clear what I mean

"Mainland" means "continental" in general; the other context it comes up in is "mainland Europe". The term is ... not completely uncontentious in its own right, but mostly on the "assumes the other China is another China" dimension.

I'm not sure what the last part means about the other China being another China, but continental sounds like a good alternative actually. No concept of main versus spare/alternate/lesser, just not an island

Yes, but the island of Hainan is considered part of "Mainland China," while the mainland areas of Hong Kong and Macau are not, so in this context it's a purely political term, trying to shape reality as opposed to just describing it.

大陸 /dàlù/ 'mainland' is used but often pejoratively. It's a politically charged issue as this article from a pro-KMT newspaper can attest: https://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20180520000567-260109

對岸 /duì àn/ 'opposite [side of the Taiwan] Strait' is a neutral term coined specifically to avoid the controversy.

If talking about politics, another neutral way could be to just say 北京 /Běijīng/.

They call it 中國 "Middle Country," or "Middle State" or "Middle Kingdom," (bear in mind that the meaning 國 "guo" has changed over time) the name for the territory and empires encompassing basically the current territory of the PRC since the Western Zhou dynasty.

Under no circumstances is Taiwan every seriously referred to as "China," not even "Republic of China," the official name in the constitution, is really used anymore. The passports now prominently say "Taiwan," and polling indicates that "Chinese" identity in Taiwan is dying swiftly with the settler colonialist KMT.

The sibling comment may be referring to political discussions between politicians, especially when talking with PRC officials. I'm not sure, I've almost never heard those terms used except by really weird super-KMT taxi drivers.

The parent comment that "Taiwan calls itself China" is simply incorrect, and the government mentioned, in the 70s, was a KMT totalitarian government that's been essentially overthrown as of the 90s.

It's a pointed issue that you'll often find heated responses from because Taiwan, for basically the first time in its history as a globally participant nation, is finally getting to establish its own identity, separate from the Dutch, the Qing, the Japanese, and the ROC/KMT settler-colonialists. There's great fear that the CPC, having failed to win a culture war here with han chauvinism / han supremacy, will simply resort to violence to imperialise the nation.

Taiwan absolutely does not call itself China. At best the government that holds sovereignty in Taiwan is called the Republic of China, and yet daily everyone calls the country itself "Taiwan," and in fact even the passports were recently changed to say "Taiwan" in enormous letters to remove any confusion about what the people want. The government would change its name to also be Taiwan, or maybe Republic of Taiwan or something like that, but it can't do so without changing the constitution, which Xi Jinping has threatened to invade immediately if this occurs.

So it's both incorrect and disingenuous to say "Taiwan calls itself China."

But the constitution does say it.

And so does Tsai Ing-wen:

> “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”[0]

So it's not factually incorrect. Of course the issue is fraught and just saying "the country on Formosa is called the Republic of China" would be completely deceptive, but nobody is doing that.

Talk about Chinese politics is always heated but I don't appreciate being accused of being disingenuous.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/tsai-ing-wen-s...

"Republic of China" is a dramatically different name than "China." To claim that both the PRC and Taiwan call themselves the same name is to muddy the waters and contribute to the PRC's cultural imperialism through linguistic mechanism.

Furthermore, though Tsai Ing-Wen is the president of the RoC, as I said, there's a rising independence movement separate from the settler-colonial government of the RoC. Among these people, and the majority of Taiwanese, Taiwan is "Taiwan," and "RoC" is at best a formality, at worse an unchosen government underwritten by an unchangeable constitution.

The new passport illustrates the point decisively: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Republic...

If you're unintentionally muddying the waters that's one thing, but I react strongly because I strongly oppose anybody that assists the PRC's cultural imperialism.

> "Traditional Chinese" is used in China

It is not. Traditional Chinese is not used in mainland china. It was superceded by simplified Chinese in areas controlled by the Chinese communist party.

This is a rather basic piece of knowledge when discussing Taiwan and Chinese relations.

... The exact point being that Taiwan by and large does not use simplified Chinese. They are different countries. They speak effectively different languages.

effectively different languages? no, both the mainland and Taiwan both speak Mandarin, although with distinctive slang and accents. I grew up learning simplified and I can guess a lot of traditional characters reasonably well, although I hear going from traditional -> simplified is much harder

Reply on news.ycombinator.com