Speaker: Janet Y. Chen, Professor of Chinese History; Director, East Asian Studies Program, Princeton University

At the end of 1975, the KMT government in Taiwan passed the Radio and Television Law, designating Mandarin as the “primary language of broadcasting” and mandating the reduction of dialect. This legislation, which took effect in January 1976, was the culmination of more than twenty years of debates over the politics of language in mass media. Radio and television broadcasting were crucial components of the state apparatus for fighting the “psychological war” (心戰) of “opposing the Communists and resisting the Soviets” (反共抗俄). Yet using the national language as the medium of broadcasting made it difficult to effectively disseminate the messages crucial to sustaining the cause of anti-Communism. Programming in Minnanhua and Hakka could reach wider audiences, but at the cost of diluting the national language project. Which was more important—the medium or the message? This talk will examine changes in the mass media environment, the effects on people’s interactions with the KMT’s ideological goals, and the history of Radio and Television Law.

Janet Chen is Professor of History and East Asian Studies, specializing in twentieth-century China.  Her first book, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953(Link is external)(Princeton University Press, 2012), is a study of the destitute homeless during a time of war and revolution.  A new book project underway, titled “The Sounds of Mandarin: The Making of a National Language in China and Taiwan,” will be a study of how ordinary people learned to speak “Mandarin” at its various stages of historical formation.