Why so vindictive over Chinese script, Mr. President?

He said he is the president of the Republic of China. He also heads the National Cultural Association of the Republic of China and “constantly” uses the Chinese language.

Ma also declared he has long been in love with the traditional system of writing Chinese that has been in use for more than 2,000 years.

All this has made him duty-bound to promote traditional script in China and across the world, President Ma told participants in a three-day international conference on Internet Chinese education in Taipei.

The reasons he gave are indefensibly lame at best.

Language is living. Moreover, it's spoken. Writing is just one form of language. And it changes, maybe not very much in the past but certainly a lot in the postwar world.

Fortunately, China had an emperor who unified the script, the Small Seal, before the dawn of the Christian era. In other nations, my goodness, hundreds of years were necessary to come to a near-consensus on how their languages should be written.

Moreover, the script is one bond that has helped maintain the world's oldest, continuous civilization.

Of course, Ma isn't the second coming of the first emperor of the Jin Dynasty, who his Democratic Progressive Party opponents constantly charge him with trying to be. They said Ma is forcing schoolchildren in Taiwan to learn the simplified script invented by Mao Zedong's linguists a half century ago.

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