Author: Xi Bangrong (PhD candidate, School of History, University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

[Abstract] During the period of Japanese colonial rule, the people of Taiwan were forced under political pressure to learn and speak Japanese. After Taiwan’s restoration in 1945, in order to meet the urgent need to restore the Chinese language and culture, a group of national language (Guoyu) promoters went to Taiwan and established the Taiwan Provincial Committee for the Promotion of the National Language. He Rong combined the multiple roles of language expert, administrative official, and publisher. In October 1947 he became chairman of the committee, and after the founding of the Mandarin Daily News (Guoyu Ribao) in 1948 he served successively as deputy publisher, publisher, and other important posts. During the early restoration period in Taiwan, He Rong undertook a series of explorations and practical efforts on the standards and methods of national language promotion and on overcoming the difficulties encountered in this work. His efforts reflect both the effective inheritance of his mainland experience in promoting the national language and a deep investigation into the complex linguistic situation of post-restoration Taiwan.

[Keywords] Taiwan Restoration; National Language Promotion; He Rong; National Language Education

The National Language Movement had a major and far-reaching influence on Taiwanese society after the restoration. To date, scholarly work has been limited by sources and has mostly focused on the Taiwan Provincial Committee for the Promotion of the National Language, the Taiwan Provincial Compilation and Translation Office, or on the thought of Wei Jiangong and Xu Shoushang regarding the promotion of the national language. As a result, it has been hard to convey the full picture of how the many promoters worked together in early-restoration Taiwan, or the dynamic, movement-like quality of the campaign under such difficult conditions. Studying the “veteran of the national language” He Rong helps us grasp both the origins of the campaign in early-restoration Taiwan and how its participants responded to the difficulties they faced during implementation.

This article draws on archives, periodicals, and letters to focus on the role He Rong played in the early-restoration promotion of the national language in Taiwan. He Rong had already been engaged in promoting the national language while on the mainland; after going to Taiwan in January 1946 he threw himself into the work there, deepening his understanding of the standards of the national language, establishing methods centered on annotating textbooks with phonetic symbols (zhuyin fuhao), and effectively cultivating a social environment for learning the language. The promoters represented by He Rong, through unremitting efforts, laid the foundation for Taiwan to speak Mandarin, write in vernacular Chinese, and understand Chinese culture.

I. Reflections on the Standard of the National Language Before and After Going to Taiwan

He Rong (1903–1990) was from Shenze, Hebei. He graduated from the English Department of Peking University in 1930. The next year he became a resident member of the Ministry of Education’s Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language, working alongside Wei Jiangong, Bai Dizhou, Xiao Jialin and others. As a researcher of national-language grammar, he initially taught Mandarin grammar in a teacher training class for the national language; later, on the recommendation of Wei Jiangong and Luo Changpei, he was appointed in 1935 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Chinese Literature at Peking University, teaching Chinese grammar.

At the same time, He Rong worked on promoting the national language and edited the Guoyu Weekly (Guoyu Zhoukan). In its pages he established a column called “Casual Talk on the National Language” (Guoyu Mantan), publishing under the pen name “Lao Tan” pieces such as “Liang Qichao Suffered for Not Knowing the National Language,” “Have You Ever Noticed?,” “Is It Really a Temple or a Shrine?,” and “Henan Opera and the Performance of Fan Zhongxiu” — light essays meant, in his words, to “fully include things of varied interest and the scattered impressions of editors and readers” within the limited space of each issue.

As early as 1932, as an editor of Guoyu Weekly, He Rong published “What Is the So-Called ‘Bureaucratic National Language’?” and “More on the ‘Bureaucratic National Language,’” expressing his thinking on standard Mandarin in a fairly systematic way. In linguistic circles, debates over whether Beijing dialect — and especially Beijing pronunciation — should be the standard had emerged in the 1920s. The Preparatory Committee for the Unification of the National Language ultimately decided in 1924 to adopt Beijing pronunciation as the standard, and in October 1926 compiled a 12-volume revised draft national pronunciation dictionary. From the standpoint of the Latinized New Script Movement, Qu Qiubai wrote “The Problem of Mass Literature and Art” and “Replying to Zhi Jing on Mass Literature,” arguing that “in the cosmopolitan large cities and modern factories, the proletariat is in fact already producing a kind of common Chinese (putonghua) — not the so-called bureaucratic national language.” These two articles, appearing on the eve of the publication of the Glossary of Standard National Pronunciation, drew the attention of national language promoters. He Rong also offered his own views.

First, He Rong clarified the phrase “the so-called bureaucratic national language.” He acknowledged that since the national language took Peking dialect as its standard, served the function once held by the old “Mandarin” (guanhua), and was promoted by the government, it could indeed be suspected of being “bureaucratic.” But he argued that the reason Peking dialect could serve as modern China’s common language had nothing to do with its having once been “Mandarin”; rather, it was simply that Peking dialect was “best qualified to become modern China’s common language.” Its qualification stemmed from the fact that Beiping was a “mixed” metropolis whose mixing gave its dialect the broadest linguistic reach, ensuring that the largest number of people could understand it. As for the Latinizers’ label of “Mr. Regional” attached to taking Peking dialect as the standard, He Rong replied that any national language must rest on some regional language as its standard — and clearly that regional language was not the speech of the “bureaucratic class” or the language used in officialdom. From the perspective of a “language of communication” (jiaotong yu), He Rong held, Peking dialect was the dialect best qualified to be the standard form of the national language. It was one of the country’s dialects, with very wide currency — covering roughly two-thirds of the country’s territory — a fact produced by historical development. He Rong’s views represented the basic stance of the Preparatory Committee. As early as 1925, Li Jinxi had argued in the “Manifesto of the National Conference on the National Language Movement” that the Beijing dialect was the standard dialect because it possessed a “natural tendency” — meaning that Beijing was the hub of communication, culture, scholarship, and politics, and the standard language was related to all of these. In other words, various favorable factors made Peking dialect widely current and thus capable of becoming the standard. The contemporary promoter Xiao Jialin further observed that, because the political center had long been in the north, the lanqing guanhua (broken Mandarin) it produced was also widespread in the south. In addition, the dialogue and lyrics of Peking opera all used Peking pronunciation, training the public’s ears. After the opening of the Tianjin–Pukou and Beijing–Hankou railways, northern speech spread even more widely to the south.

Second, He Rong held that establishing a standard language would not suppress dialects. The Preparatory Committee had compiled the Glossary of Standard National Pronunciation using Peking pronunciation as the standard and asked the Ministry of Education to make it the national pronunciation standard. This step was only meant to set a pronunciation standard, and did not amount to “compulsion,” because setting a standard had its own “theoretical and factual reasons.” The standard had been built on “more than thirty years of specialist scholarly debate and practical teaching experience.” Here He Rong echoed Li Jinxi’s idea of “non-uniformism” — that “the national language is just one standard dialect; the countless other non-standard dialects can still continue to exist and develop freely.” He Rong further analyzed, from a linguistic perspective, the dialectical relationship between dialects and the standard. First, the standard language has three aspects — sounds, words, and sentence structure — and as for sentence structure, Peking speech does not differ greatly from other dialects. Second, Peking dialect cannot be the standard language by nature; what truly serves as the standard is “Peking putonghua.” Third, promoting the national language does not erase the value of dialects, and indeed He Rong advocated that the national language absorb words from dialects. He even proposed “dialects becoming national-language-ized, and the national language becoming dialect-ized” — the former meaning that dialect elements gradually become standard language, the latter meaning using the national language to refine dialects.

Finally, He Rong took an open attitude toward the “common language of the rising classes.” Qu Qiubai had argued that “we need a vernacular Chinese commonly used by people of every province.” He Rong felt there was no fundamental disagreement between Qu Qiubai’s view and his own — both wanted to unify the language; the disagreement was only over what to take as the standard for promotion. The “national language” and what Qu Qiubai called the “common language of the rising classes” were not in themselves in conflict. If in the future a “Glossary of the Common Language of the Rising Classes” became the pronunciation standard, then this “existing” or “currently bureaucratically prescribed” standard could of course be cancelled. He Rong held that the establishment of the standard language at the time was for mass education and would not at all hinder the emergence and development of the “common language of the rising classes.” He went on to actively practice the ideal of “popularization,” building popular wartime literature and art and following the trend of “writings into the army, writings into the countryside” — earning, alongside Lao She and Lao Xiang (Wang Xiangchen), a place among the so-called “Three Elders” of wartime popular literature and art.

In 1941 He Rong was appointed a special member of the National Language Promotion Committee, and at the National Language Training Class set up by the Central Political School he was the lead instructor for national-language grammar and parts-of-speech research. In 1944 the Ministry of Education established institutions for training national-language teachers, and He Rong served as director of the “National Language Special Course” at the Institute of Social Education in Bishan, Sichuan. Once the Nationalist government began planning the recovery of Taiwan, the Ministry of Education’s National Language Promotion Committee fully supported the newly established Taiwan Investigation Committee in dealing with all kinds of issues in Taiwan’s language education. Article 44 of the Outline Plan for the Takeover of Taiwan, drafted in March 1945, stated that “after takeover, a plan for the universalization of the national language shall be established and implemented step by step within set time limits,” explicitly defining the post-restoration policy on language and writing. Holding fast to the goals of promoting the national language and restoring Chinese writing, and aligning with Taiwan’s educational direction, the Taiwan Provincial Administrative Executive Office, after the restoration, invited promoters of the national language to go to Taiwan in advance — three sent by the Ministry of Education (Wei Jiangong, He Rong, and Wang Ju) and five others invited by the Executive Office. Their tasks were to investigate the environment, set up institutions, and plan the corresponding organization, staffing, and budget. In April 1946 the Taiwan Provincial Committee for the Promotion of the National Language was founded, with Wei Jiangong as chairman and He Rong as deputy chairman, and standing members Fang Shiduo, Li Jiannan, Qi Tiehen, Sun Peiliang, and Wang Yuchuan. In July 1947 Wei Jiangong returned to Beijing and He Rong became chairman.

In the early restoration period, the first task of promoting the national language in Taiwan was to establish its standard. The Provincial Committee combined the Glossary of Standard National Pronunciation with the Table of Print Forms of Phonetic Symbols Annotated Beside Characters, the Pronunciation Table of Phonetic Symbols, and the Brief Account of National Pronunciation into the Compendium of Standard National Pronunciation, which was officially released to the public. At the first standing committee meeting of the Provincial Committee, Wei Jiangong said: “The Compendium of Standard National Pronunciation has been compiled by this committee and handed to the Education Department for printing. Soon society will have a standard national pronunciation, and we can move on to further work.” In tandem with this standard “book,” Qi Tiehen served as the standard “person,” responsible for model broadcasts and explanations on the radio. In planning the committee’s membership, He Rong specifically invited Li Jiannan, head of the National Language Special Course at the National Institute of Social Education, to share with Qi Tiehen — long engaged in standard pronunciation work — the duty of explaining the standard. In a letter to Xiao Jialin, resident member of the Ministry of Education’s Promotion Committee, He Rong explained the reason for inviting Li Jiannan: “Mr. Qi alone is too busy, and his speech is too natural for beginners to grasp; Jiannan’s speech is more ‘acquired’ yet also standard, and can assist Mr. Qi.”

Once the standard was set, the Provincial Committee carried out related publicity and education to clarify divergent understandings of the standard in actual learning. On 10 March 1946, He Rong published “On ‘Mahu-ist’ National Language Education” in the Sunday Forum supplement of Taiwan Xinsheng Bao, and later “On the Standard of the National Language” in the same paper’s National Language Supplement. In these two articles he criticized two extreme attitudes toward learning the national language. The first, common among the Taiwanese public, was a “mahu-ist” attitude that disregarded the standard, with some saying its requirements “need not be too strict.” He Rong estimated that the national language taught by 80–90% of primary school teachers nationwide was in fact a dialect-tinged version — essentially the old “lanqing guanhua,” a putonghua by which people could more or less understand each other. He held that this attitude was harmful to the future of national-language education, since linguistic unity was as important as political unity. The second was the “unwilling-to-be-broken” (bu gan lan qing) attitude held by some Taiwanese learners. He Rong felt this was equally undesirable. Specifically, demanding that one’s own speech meet the standard was correct, but one should not pursue the standard rigidly so that every initial, final, and tone matched perfectly. Beginners should not see the standard as wooden — phonologically, some characters have multiple readings, or have separate “literary” and “colloquial” pronunciations. He Rong argued that although everyone should strive toward the standard, not everyone could fully master it; therefore learners must learn not only to “speak” the standard language but also to “hear” speech that fell short of it. His view was close to Wei Jiangong’s: “Those who teach must be standard; those who learn must be able to speak up to the standard, while their ears must be able to hear much that is not.”

II. Promoting Phonetic Annotation in Textbooks to Implement the Standard

In May 1946 Wei Jiangong drafted the Outline of the National Language Movement, which set out: 1. comparison of dialect pronunciations; 2. from “Confucius said” to national pronunciation; 3. refurbishing Japanese-influenced syntax and reading directly in national pronunciation; 4. comparison of word classes; 5. use of phonetic symbols; 6. encouragement of learners’ psychology. The first four items targeted those who knew Chinese characters and spoke Taiwanese dialects: such people could learn the national language by reading characters with phonetic symbols and inferring national pronunciations from dialect pronunciations. This “learning the national language by comparing it with one’s dialect” required learners to compare and reason between dialect and standard, recognizing that dialects are forms of Chinese, so that using one’s dialect as a bridge to learn the standard would be more effective. The Provincial Committee began conducting dialect surveys in Taiwan, devised dialect phonetic symbols for Hokkien, and edited the Glossary Common to National Language and Taiwanese as supporting material.

But He Rong found that “most Taiwanese compatriots have lost the key of ‘learning the national language from dialect’” — at least in terms of the actual numbers who commanded the dialects. For those who did, “learning the national language from dialect” could achieve quick results. But because of Japanese suppression, dialects had failed to keep up with the times and could no longer meet the cultural needs of contemporary life; meanwhile in everyday life the younger generation could not really speak the dialects. So those without dialect competence — illiterate adults, beginning children, or those who knew characters but could not pronounce them in the dialect — needed to acquire the standard directly through phonetic symbols.

The phonetic symbols themselves, the bronze type for phonetically-annotated characters, and the phonetic-symbol teaching method were all important achievements of the earlier National Language Movement. The phonetic symbols had been proposed by the Conference on Pronunciation Unification in the early Republic and were promulgated nationwide by the Nationalist government in 1930. In 1934 the Ministry of Education funded the Zhonghua Book Company to produce Song-style bronze type for phonetically-annotated characters, solving the typography problem. The phonetic-symbol teaching method, based on the principle of “synthesize first, analyze later,” emerged in 1934 in the experimental district of the Ding County Mass Education Promotion Society, and was tested in mass literacy work during the war. He Rong made full use of these prior gains, taking Taiwan’s “national schools” as a pilot to work out a path to promoting standard Mandarin centered on phonetic-symbol teaching, so that the national language could truly take root in Taiwan both in fact and in law.

(1) Advocating Full Phonetic Annotation of Textbooks

He Rong first reviewed the history of phonetic annotation of textbooks on the mainland and argued that primary-school textbooks should be fully annotated. The 1935 Measures for Promoting Phonetically-Annotated National Characters had already proposed annotating textbooks: Article 1 required all text in citizens’ schools and short-term primary-school textbooks to use phonetically-annotated characters; Article 2 required the new-character lists in lower primary national-language textbooks to use them in full; Article 3 required common-knowledge textbooks in lower primary and the national-language, social-studies, and natural-studies textbooks of upper primary to use them in full. The lower-primary national-language textbooks themselves were not to be fully annotated — only new characters needed partial annotation. The educational rationale was that “each subject in primary school has its own main aim; one aim of national-language teaching is to drill characters, and learning characters requires forced memorization; if non-new characters were also annotated, children would lose the chance for that forced memorization, which would be inconsistent with the aim of the subject.”

After going to Taiwan, educational psychologists continued to argue for annotating only new characters. He Rong rebutted them on grounds of cost. He argued that annotating only new characters required other supporting “soft” conditions: teachers would need detailed and accurate teaching manuals covering variant readings, sound changes, tone changes, neutral tones, and so on, and students would need a correctly annotated dictionary giving the precise pronunciations of every character in the textbooks. Both conditions were unattainable in the short post-restoration period in Taiwan.

He Rong likewise criticized, on psychological grounds, Xiang Jutan’s worry that “children will treat the phonetic symbols as Chinese (national) characters.” He pointed out that in a complete teaching sequence, first-grade pupils first learn to speak and to use phonetic symbols during the first eight weeks; only in the ninth week does the teacher use the phonetic symbols to teach Chinese characters. Speech instruction, phonetic-symbol instruction, and character instruction are three distinct yet sequential stages, and would not lead children to mistake the phonetic symbols for characters. At the same time, learning the symbols presupposes that the child has already learned to speak, which provides a phonetic basis. Phonetic-symbol learning lets children connect the “sound” they utter with the “shape” of the symbol, and lets them use the symbols to write down speech, thereby mastering the symbols. Furthermore, He Rong argued that children are surrounded by an overall environment of Chinese characters that prevents Xiang’s worry from materializing: “The textbook itself is in Chinese characters; teachers teach them to recognize, write, and use Chinese characters — all of which are conditions inducing or compelling them to learn Chinese characters.”

(2) Conditions for Phonetic Printing

In Taiwan’s national-language work, He Rong took into account the material conditions after restoration and the special significance of the phonetic symbols for Taiwan. The 1935 Measures had been hard to enforce after the Nationalist government moved to Chongqing on the outbreak of the war. Citing the publishers’ lack of bronze type and the need to “amend the law to fit the facts,” the Ministry of Education revised the Measures in 1945, deleting the most important Article 3 — which had required full annotation of common-knowledge textbooks in lower primary and of national-language, social-studies, and natural-studies textbooks in upper primary. In the early restoration period, the promoters of the national language in Chongqing had “assumed that Taiwan’s printing industry was at least more advanced than Chongqing’s, so that there would be a way to print all kinds of teaching materials,” and judged it unnecessary to ship all the printing equipment needed for promotion across to Taiwan.

But after going to Taiwan, He Rong found that Taiwan in fact could not produce bronze type. He wrote to Xiao Jialin: Taiwan could not make bronze type — “we previously overestimated Taiwan’s cultural industry”; “the Japanese colonial policy did not aim to develop culture, nor did it want to industrialize Taiwan; everything was just enough for use, just enough to serve the home country.” At a Taiwan Provincial Education Symposium in late 1946, teachers proposed: “The language teaching materials are too difficult; we hope they can be annotated with the national phonetic symbols, to make learning easier.” But the lead matrices for the phonetic symbols were lacking, making the printing of materials a problem. Without bronze type, phonetically-annotated readings could only be produced by piecing together individual symbols, which increased typesetting errors and proofreading costs. Only in the second half of 1948, when the Ministry of Education funded the launch of a phonetically-annotated Mandarin Daily News in Taiwan, did Taiwan acquire casting and typesetting equipment, laying the material foundation for printing phonetically-annotated textbooks.

Promoting the phonetic symbols had a special significance in the Taiwanese context. He Rong noticed that the pronunciation of “national characters” in Taiwan had lost its original sphere of use. Chinese characters had existed under Japanese rule, but with Japanese sounds and meanings — these “Japanese Chinese characters” differed from Chinese ones in both sound and sense. He Rong argued that for Taiwan to truly “return its Chinese characters to their roots and bring them back to life” — to clear away the imprint of the Japanese versions — it had to annotate textbooks with phonetic symbols. This would both promote the unity of the national language and aid character learning; once students mastered the phonetic symbols, they could study on their own, greatly easing the burden on teachers.

(3) Working Out a Teaching Method through Classroom Experiments

He Rong was good at using teaching experiments to develop teaching methods, refine the textbook annotation scheme, and ensure its full implementation. He had practical experience in using phonetic symbols for the education of disabled veterans: in 1939, with Wang Ju, Wang Yuchuan, Li Jiannan and others, he had set up the Honored Veterans Vocational Guidance Society in Chongqing, working on textbooks with phonetic symbols. The first stage taught the 40 phonetic symbols, training veterans to spell with them and distinguish the four tones; the second stage was reading drills to raise reading speed and ability; the third provided phonetically-annotated readings, focusing on having veterans recognize new characters and absorb knowledge through self-study. The experiments showed that with the help of the phonetic symbols and effective teaching methods, illiterate adults could read phonetically-annotated character books within a month.

Wang Yuchuan held that since Taiwan was a dialect region, primary national-language classes should not begin with the regular textbook but should teach speaking and the phonetic symbols first. He therefore conducted “one plan, four experiments” at the Provincial Committee’s affiliated National Language Experimental Primary School. After four rounds of experiments, the designers compared test results and confirmed that teaching speech and phonetic symbols before tackling the textbook produced better outcomes. He Rong allocated a special fund to publish Wang Yuchuan’s Speaking Materials and Methods for the National Language and supported continued experimental work. In his preface to that book, He Rong specifically noted: “Materials and methods are inseparable; to use this set of materials, one must teach by the methods the editor describes.”

On this basis, He Rong published Issues in Primary School National-Language Materials, arguing that a complete phonetic-symbol teaching scheme should be premised on speech instruction, centered on phonetic symbols, and ultimately safeguarded by reform of the teaching materials. He then formally proposed to the Ministry of Education a phonetic-symbol teaching method that fully covered three aspects: speaking materials and methods, methods for learning the phonetic symbols, and full annotation of textbooks. He ultimately pushed the Ministry to revise curriculum standards and re-edit national-language textbooks, greatly improving the effectiveness of primary national-language teaching.

III. Cultivating a Social Environment for Learning Standard Mandarin

Achieving the standardization of the language, the goal of the National Language Movement, meant clearing away the influence of Japanese colonialism and restoring a social environment in which the national language could be learned. After the restoration, promoters reached consensus on this. He Rong, starting from the relationship between social and school education, held that social education was not merely a supplement to schooling but a force amplifying it — together they formed “the dual track of language education.” For school language education could change only the language environment students experienced at school; if outside school the environment remained Japanese, the effects of school language education would be hard to secure.

On this basis, He Rong stressed that the National Language Movement was a political socio-cultural movement. Reviewing its early-Republic history, he noted that promoters had set standards, reformed literary style, devised letters, edited and taught textbooks, and pushed the Ministry of Education to set up the Conference on Pronunciation Unification and to order the replacement of classical Chinese (guowen) by vernacular Chinese (yutiwen). He Rong saw this as “a social National Language Movement that gave rise to state political measures,” but also held that “political measures still need a social movement to push them forward” — otherwise government decrees would not be fully implemented and the goals of the movement would only be partly realized. To this end, He Rong and other promoters worked actively to bring scholars, the public, and the government together to advance the movement.

The Provincial Committee first recognized that restoring the country’s own language was the highest meaning of the National Language Movement: it had to put into practice not only the Outline Plan for the Takeover of Taiwan and similar documents, but also clear away the social damage of Japanese colonialism. After the February 28 Incident, He Rong published “The Importance of Language Education in Taiwan — How the Japanese Ruled Taiwan,” giving examples of the Japanese effort to wipe out Taiwanese dialects. He pointed out that the Japanese tactic was that “the names of all modern goods had to be learned in Japanese.” The Japanese ban on dialects prevented them from staying alive with the times, ultimately causing “the cutting-off of Taiwanese people’s spiritual link to the motherland.” Cultural-linguistic alienation thus served to divide the two sides of the strait, leaving in the minds of Taiwanese a distinction between “Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese,” a barrier that could only be removed through linguistic communion. So promoters in fact bore the duty of “doing battle with the Japanese language, writing, and Japanese ideology.”

In the early restoration period, although the movement continued, the inertia of language use was strong, and Taiwan was still a “Japanese-speaking society”: in classrooms, “primary-school students spoke Mandarin, middle-school students spoke Hokkien, and university students spoke Japanese.” He Rong held that to change this situation, the whole society had to back the movement: socially, people in every walk of life had to become aware of the need to recover the country’s own language; politically, the authorities had to make it easier to mount a social movement. Gonglun Bao also pointed out that behind the “Japanese-speaking society” lay the dilution of teachers’ national consciousness, who had given up their supervisory responsibilities; it also reflected the awkward standing of the Provincial Committee — “the National Language Promotion Committee, at some point, had been pushed to the cold sidelines, losing the strong support it had enjoyed at the start of the restoration, and was therefore unable to push through full national-language work.” The only units that cooperated with it long-term were the Taiwan Provincial Training Corps and the broadcasting station. The Taiwan Provincial Compilation and Translation Office, intended to “advance the psychological reconstruction of Taiwanese compatriots and to help with cultural and exemplary research,” lasted little more than a year and was abolished after the February 28 Incident.

In addition, the heavy import of Japanese books, newspapers, magazines, and films deepened the “Japanese-speaking society.” Although the government restricted Japanese language space, in the chaotic situation private trade outside official control developed quickly, providing a channel for Japanese publications into Taiwan. He Rong argued that this would create a contest among different cultural forces and bring an illusion to Taiwanese society: “Outside government offices and schools, the slogan banning Japanese is no longer easy to shout loudly. This is no different from planting weeds beside the seedlings of the National Language Movement to rob them of nutrients, harming the work of language restoration. Of course we must continue to remove Japanese language and writing — but the road to completing this work has been lengthened.” Some even argued that newspapers and journals should set up Japanese editions to restore the use of the language — a phenomenon that the Provincial Committee had to correct.

Promoters had not only to spread the meaning of the movement positively, but also at this critical moment to alert society to the danger of Japanese language and writing. In October 1947, on the second anniversary of Taiwan’s restoration, He Rong launched a “Province-wide No-Japanese-Speaking Petition Campaign.” Later he published “Taiwan Should Still Not Use Japanese Language and Writing,” urging that government cultural and educational policy not “drink poison to quench thirst” by using Japanese as a ready-made tool for the sake of so-called “convenience.” Language has a strong national character, and Japanese had, after all, been a tool used by Japan to assimilate Taiwan; restoring its use as policy would mean disregarding the painful experience of the Taiwanese people.

He Rong tackled “the passivity of books and newspapers” as a way to fundamentally improve the lack of suitable national-language reading material during the linguistic transition. In the early restoration period, the quality of national-language books and newspapers in Taiwan was uneven; not a single newspaper carried phonetic annotation, and phonetically-annotated books were very few. The national language could be learned in half a year, but without books and newspapers as aids, the characters were not easy to learn. He Rong argued that to enable Taiwanese readers to follow what they read, one had to raise readers’ reading ability while also working on the books and newspapers themselves — that is, change “the passivity of books and newspapers.” Chinese characters are complex in form, and classical Chinese is harder to follow than vernacular — these are the objective difficulties of learning the national language. Moreover, the major newspapers of the day were full of difficult classical prose, so that once the Japanese-language editions were cancelled, locals were suddenly turned into illiterates with nothing to read. He Rong proposed: “At the very least, editorial work should rewrite the classical phrases in the news into vernacular, and the headlines should be made colloquial too.” Promoters thus urgently needed to reshape newspaper content into language understandable by beginners of the national language and to set about publishing a phonetically-annotated daily newspaper.

In May 1948 He Rong arrived in Shanghai to study the relocation of the Guoyu Xiaobao (National Language Small Paper) to Taiwan. From May to October 1948 he raised funds, arranged premises, and bought machinery for the paper. On 25 October the Guoyu Xiaobao resumed publication in Taiwan, changed from a thrice-weekly to a daily, and was renamed the Mandarin Daily News (Guoyu Ribao). He Rong held the posts of deputy publisher, publisher, distributor, and chair of the board until his death. Under his efforts, the paper gradually clarified its mission, took root in Taiwanese society, and became an important tool for spreading national-language education. The publication of the Mandarin Daily News in Taiwan continued the spirit of its predecessors Minzhong Xiaobao and Guoyu Xiaobao. The Minzhong Xiaobao had three strengths: “popular and easy, suited to the tastes of ordinary readers; cheap, so that one month’s subscription to a major paper bought a year of this one; phonetically annotated character by character, so that anyone who learned the phonetic symbols could understand it without a teacher.” The Mandarin Daily News insisted on printing in phonetically-annotated characters, helping readers “recognize characters through reading” and “use phonetic symbols to correct pronunciation.” It also followed the principle of “speech and writing as one,” establishing a modern, native vernacular written language. Wei Jiangong praised He Rong’s move: “That Messrs. He and Fang were able to go to Shanghai and bring the Xiaobao to Taiwan is a blessing for the Taiwanese and a new path for the National Language Committee. Taiwan really does need a phonetically-annotated vernacular paper.”

In running the paper, He Rong creatively proposed the principle of “paper and committee as one,” meaning the Mandarin Daily News and the Provincial Committee would support each other in personnel, with members of the Committee joining the paper’s board in their personal capacity. This both eased the paper’s financial burden and helped to put the latest research ideas of the national-language work into practice. The paper carried columns aimed at teachers — Teaching Materials and Methods, National Education, Language Supplement A, and Language Supplement B — as well as columns for children and youth: Children, Youth, Selected Books and Articles, and Selected Texts Old and New. Each was edited personally by a member of the Committee: He Rong edited Weekend and Language Supplement B; Wang Yuchuan handled Supplementary Materials for Primary School National Language; Qi Tiehen ran Language Supplement A; Li Jiannan looked after Primary School Teaching Materials and Methods; Qi Zhixian, National Education; and Fang Shiduo, Selected Books and Articles. The printing of popular reading material and the publication of a phonetically-annotated newspaper played an important part in cultivating a social environment for learning the national language.

Conclusion

The National Language Movement of the early restoration period in Taiwan, marked by the founding of the Provincial Committee for the Promotion of the National Language, combined specialist knowledge, dedicated funding, and trained personnel to formulate targeted policy, clear the influence of Japanese, promote the national language and Chinese writing, and restore the social environment for learning Mandarin. Promoters, government, and the public reached consensus and joined forces, deepening the movement into a social movement of “returning to China.” After more than two years, the standard of the national language had moved from being “established” to being “expanded,” and from “expanded” to “completed.”

As a key figure in the Provincial Committee, He Rong combined the roles of language expert, administrator, and publisher. He pushed for phonetic annotation of textbooks to put the standard of the national language into practice; at the same time, with the Mandarin Daily News as his platform, he took part in the social spread of the movement. The Committee under He Rong’s leadership, in a relatively short span, drew on the achievements of the mainland National Language Movement to advance standard Mandarin in Taiwan, becoming the principal force pushing the movement forward.

Originally published in *Republican Archives (Minguo Dang’an), 2025, No. 4. Author: Xi Bangrong, PhD candidate, School of History, University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.*