We often think of language as a democratic field, but it is not quite the common property of its speakers, argues Jeffrey Weng, APARC’s 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow on contemporary Asia. Rather, language is a skill that must be learned, says Weng, and it creates social divisions as much as it bridges divides. 

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What has shaped your interest and research into the study of language and linguistic dissemination?

As a first-grade student in the early 1990s attending Chinese school in central New Jersey on Saturday mornings, I learned how to write my first complete sentence in the language: “I am an overseas Chinese.” Now, this was a curious sentence to teach to a class full of American-born children of Taiwanese parents, and it’s a reminder that language is never a neutral conveyor of meaning. Language cannot but be freighted with social, cultural, and political import, a lesson reinforced in my high-school Spanish classes, in which I made my first forays into literature in a foreign language: stories by the great writers of Spain and Latin America not only spoke a wholly different language, but they told wholly different stories from those of their British and American counterparts.

Linguistic difference also is a signal of individual and social difference: my childhood visits with family in Taiwan opened my ears to a cacophonous Babel in the media and on the streets—though we spoke Mandarin at home, whenever we went out, people speaking Taiwanese were everywhere to be seen and heard. This was further amplified when I visited mainland China for the first time in my early 20s. Beijing, the supposed wellspring of the nation’s language, was bewildering—I could not understand much of the unselfconscious speech of the locals. And traveling several hundred miles in any direction would only deepen my incomprehension. And yet, on the radio and on TV, during formal events and on university campuses, there was always Mandarin to clear the way. I wanted to learn more about how this language situation came to be. For me, studying the social, cultural, and political nature of language is a way to a deeper understanding of how people are united and divided in vastly different contexts across the globe.

As you’ve looked deeper into how language shapes society and society shapes language, what is something surprising you’ve come to realize about that relationship?

People often see language as the ultimate democratic field when it comes to cultural practice. No matter how much you might tell people not to split their infinitives or end their sentences with prepositions, popular practice will always win the day. Or so we English speakers think. Ever since Merriam-Webster came out with its infamously descriptivist Third New International Dictionary in 1961, Anglophone language nerds have fought over whether dictionaries should be “prescriptive”—that is, rule-setting—or “descriptive”—reflective of popular usage. But really, these are two sides of the same coin. We take it for granted that privately-owned publishers of dictionaries spell out the supposed norms of our language. Not only that, we even think this ought to be the case. French is the usual counterexample: when government language authorities in Quebec or Paris try to stem the Anglophone tide, we think it absurd that so-called authorities would ever try to rule over something so fundamentally unruly as language.

In my research, however, I learned how fundamentally invented Mandarin as a language is—from its highly artificial pronunciation to the way its orthography has been stabilized. There used to be a lot of variability in how characters were written and how they could be used, much like English spelling before the 18th century. Mandarin, both spoken and written, was standardized only in the 1920s to facilitate mass literacy and national cohesion. So linguistic change might often follow and reflect social change, but the process can also operate in reverse—a government can change language in hopes of facilitating social change.

In your latest journal publication, you argue that language nationalization in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam between 1870-1950 was a state-led, top-down process directed at remaking society rather than the more traditional view of diffusion through trade, economics, and cultural exchange. Why is this an important distinction to make?

Again, we often see language as a democratic field, the common property of its speakers, but it isn’t really. Sociolinguists are often quick to remind us that linguistic differences reflect class differences—“proper” language is that of “educated” speakers. But language is a skill, and skills must be learned. Some people can learn skills more easily than others, whether through natural ability or, more importantly, the life circumstances they were born into. Rich people can more easily get a good education. Educational disparities are now part and parcel of today’s broader debates about inequality. But the very fact that we think this is a problem is a product of developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before then, broad swaths of humanity were totally illiterate and had no chance at being educated, and most people did not think this was a problem. In Europe, the language of the Church and academia, even to some extent in Protestant areas, was Latin until the 18th century. Local vernaculars had gradually developed as independent media of communication in government chancelleries and popular literature since the Middle Ages, but they did not really gain ascendancy until the age of print-capitalism and nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Marxian-influenced scholars have therefore concluded that the rise of national languages coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose own languages became those of the nations they constructed.

In France, for example, while revolutionaries in the 1790s advocated the use of Parisian French to unify a country divided by hundreds of local forms of speech, into the mid-19th century, even journeying 50 miles outside Paris found travelers having trouble making themselves understood to the locals. It took more than a century for French to gain a foothold in most of the country. Asia, too, was a polyglot patchwork for millennia, unified at the top by an arcane language much like Latin—Classical Chinese. This situation became politically untenable in the 19th century as European imperialism encroached on traditional sovereignties in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In order to counter the foreign threat, governments sought to strengthen their societies by educating their populations, which required making it easier to learn how to read and write. While standard languages have been described by historians and sociolinguists as “artificial” for less-privileged learners, Asia’s standard languages were artificial even to their bourgeois inventors.

Our understanding of the present is invariably colored by our interpretation of the past: if we understand a national language to be a bourgeois imposition that diffused via economic development, then we more easily see its continued imposition as a perpetuation of class prejudices. If on the other hand, we see an invented national language as a tool for bridging regional divisions and expanding economic opportunity for our children, then we feel much more positively about the spread of such languages. Both interpretations can be true at the same time, but we must remember that one is inseparable from the other.

Do you see any parallels between how language nationalization has occurred in the past to how language and society are shaping one another in the present?

The number of “standard” Mandarin speakers in the early 1930s could be counted on one hand. Today, it’s the world’s largest language by a number of “native” speakers. Though it began as an elite nationalizing project that was largely ignored by the masses of people in China, Mandarin is now more often seen as a hegemonic threat to local languages and cultures. Language can thus bridge divides, but also create new divisions. People in China are often ambivalent about the pace of change these days. When I visited cousins in rural Fujian during the Lunar New Year a few years ago, I noticed that all my nieces and nephews spoke Mandarin in almost all situations, to their parents, and especially to one another. Only my grandparents’ generation used the local Fuqing dialect as a matter of course. My parents’ generation spoke dialect to their parents, but a mix of Mandarin and dialect to their children—the cousins of my generation, who were able to speak the dialect, but were more comfortable speaking Mandarin among themselves and to their children. One of my young nieces who’d grown up in Beijing, where her parents had moved for work, even had a perfect Beijing accent. In a span of three generations, migration due to expanded opportunity had wrought enormous change in language habits. Much had been gained, but also much had been lost.

How has your time at APARC as one of our Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows aided your research project?

It’s certainly been a strange year to be a postdoc, given how we’ve all been operating remotely. Nevertheless, life and work have continued, and we’ve all been able to find new ways of building community and getting things done. I’ve personally benefited from the access to the vast academic resources of Stanford—library access, even online alone, is a lifeline to any researcher. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to chat on Zoom with Stanford faculty about research and connect with my fellow postdocs to support one another as we figure out how to move forward in our careers in these challenging times.

With your recent appointment as an assistant professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei, how do you anticipate your research interests growing and developing given the tension between Taiwan and China?

I am gratified to begin my academic career in a place of such diversity and openness as Taiwan. Language and identity are constant sites of contention in Taiwan's politics, and I look forward to expanding my on-the-ground understanding of these issues as I begin teaching in the sociology department at National Taiwan University. It is nothing short of miraculous that democracy has flourished at such an intersection of empires, colonialism, repressions, and struggles. And it is unsettling to see that flourishing takes place in such a precarious geopolitical location. NTU's sociology department is at the forefront of understanding all of these vital issues as we barrel forward into an ever more uncertain future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economies and expectations for economic growth and development the world over. But even before the pandemic, Asian economies were reassessing their growth strategies.

In a podcast conversation about the new edited volume Shifting Gears in Innovation Policy: Strategies from Asia, APARC's Korea Program Deputy Director Yong Suk Lee discusses some of the impediments Asian countries face in trying to encourage economic development and entrepreneurship, but also the inherent strengths that could allow innovative strategies take hold and grow in East Asia. Listen to the full conversation below.

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Edited by Lee, Gi-Wook Shin, and Takeo Hoshi, Shifting Gears in Innovation Policy is the first of three volumes resulting from APARC's Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation project that produces policy research to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in East Asia and the greater Asia-Pacific region.

Lee explains, “Many Asian countries achieved economic growth by importing new technologies from advanced economies like the U.S., using them very effectively, and then expanding exports. But now where East Asia stands, many of these countries have already successfully caught up to the technological frontier of advanced economies, so if they want to maintain growth, there needs to be a shift in their strategies.”

The shift Lee and the other volume authors propose is one towards economic growth that is driven by innovation and entrepreneurship rather than the ‘catch-up’ model that Asian economies have commonly relied on. Unlike startup hubs such as the San Francisco Bay Area of California, Asian countries often lack an entrepreneurial tradition because of antagonistic financial structures and differences in cultural definitions of success. These additional financial and social risks have cast entrepreneurial endeavors in an unattractive light for multiple generations of workers.

But encouraging entrepreneurship and endemic innovation are crucial to maintaining stable economic growth. With rapidly aging populations, greater interconnections in both trade and diplomacy, and transformation in the workforce, workplace, and work itself, effectively adapting development strategies to meet present and future challenges remains a central priority for East Asia policymakers and innovators alike. As Lee advises, “There’s strong infrastructure in East Asia, both physically and digitally, which is a great advantage. But they’re now at a frontier with no trajectory to follow, and there needs to be indigenous growth and continuous innovation in order to not be surpassed by competitors.”

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Last week, the world was waiting to see whether U.S. President Donald Trump would be reelected. Four days later, the verdict was in. Joe Biden, winning more overall votes than any other candidate in U.S. history, will be the 46th president of the United States.

While the United States was fixated on the final days of campaigning, China didn’t miss a beat in its aggression toward Taiwan. The day before the U.S. presidential election, Chinese aircraft flew into Taiwan’s airspace eight separate times. These military maneuvers are part of a disturbing trend of increased Chinese military activity over the past two months. Since Sept. 9, Beijing has flown near-constant sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), sometimes conducting as many as 30 in a day. On Sept. 21, China claimed that the median line, the boundary between the airspace of Taiwan and China that both sides had generally respected for decades, no longer existed.

These are the tense cross-strait circumstances a newly elected Biden will step into when he takes the oath of office in January. The decisions he makes concerning Taiwan will shape the future of the self-governing island, a democracy of nearly 24 million people and the 21st- largest economy in the world, as well as the tenor of U.S.-China relations regional stability.

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So what can we expect from the next president on Taiwan? We can already see some differences emerge. For example, when Trump won the 2016 election, he received congratulations from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen via phone. This made him the first president or president-elect to speak directly to the president of Taiwan since the United States normalized relations with Beijing in 1979. On the occasion of Biden’s election, no such phone call took place. Instead, Tsai sent her congratulations via Twitter, avoiding direct contact between the two.

This is just one anecdote. But does it suggest that Biden’s approach to Taiwan will differ greatly from that of the Trump administration?

Yes and no. The cornerstones of U.S. Taiwan policy—arms sales and strategic ambiguity—will change little under a Biden administration. The big difference will be in how Biden tries to maintain stability across the Strait.

The Trump administration has been bold in its arms sales, approving over $17 billion worth of arms over the past four years and blurring the line between offensive and defensive weaponry. Moreover, the Trump administration agreed to sell 66 F-16s to Taiwan in one of the largest arms sale packages ever offered to the island nation.

Yet while Trump earned praise for bolstering Taiwanese defenses against a possible mainland invasion, his approach to arms sales did not deviate significantly from his predecessors. The stated goal of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan is to ensure the “security, or social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan” and to further the “principle of maintaining peace and stability in the Western Pacific.” In other words, arms sales are largely dependent on the military threat Beijing poses.

For example, relations between the PRC and Taiwan deteriorated during the early 1990s, leading to the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis and a spike in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan at the beginning of the Clinton administration. Trump was also not the first president to sell high-end aircraft to Taiwan; President George H. W. Bush sold F-16s. And while Clinton, the second Bush, and Obama all decided against selling the F-16, choosing instead to help upgrade and maintain aircraft already in Taiwan’s possession, the recent sale received bipartisan support largely because of the heightened threat posed by Beijing today.

Biden will maintain similar policies, continuing to offer arms to Taipei to address the growing threat across the Strait. Biden is a strong supporter of the policy; he was one of the original senators who voted for the Taiwan Relations Act, which serves as the basis for the sales. But that doesn’t mean that he will offer similarly large packages to Taipei; some of the island’s need for weaponry and equipment has already been fulfilled through recent sales. It is also possible that Biden may try to soften the blow to Beijing by not overly publicizing sales or by notifying Beijing privately before sales are announced. But the sales themselves will continue regardless.

When it comes to America’s overall position, strategic ambiguity has guided U.S. policy on Taiwan for decades. Presidents have periodically questioned the policy, but none have gone so far as to change it.

The same can be said for Trump. Initially, the direct call between him and Tsai caused many to speculate that he may choose to support Taiwan’s independence openly. But he was cautious in the following years to avoid actions that Beijing or Taipei could construe as recognition. Indeed, despite attempts from within his party to discard strategic ambiguity, Trump limited himself to the vague, “China knows what I’m gonna do.”

Recently, there has been a flurry of debate about whether it’s time to abandon the policy as a warning to Beijing. But such views likely do not represent those of the president-elect. Biden is on record with his support of strategic ambiguity, which he has described as “reserv[ing] the right to use force to defend Taiwan but [keep] mum about the circumstances in which we might, or might not, intervene in a war across the Taiwan Strait.”

Continuing to embrace strategic ambiguity doesn’t mean Biden will be less supportive of Taiwan than Trump. Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to extend congratulations to Tsai when she won reelection in January. But he correctly views strategic ambiguity as the best way to deter Beijing without emboldening Taiwan. In his words, “The president should not cede to Taiwan, much less to China, the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait.”

If the main contours of U.S.-Taiwan policy remain the same, then does it make a difference who is president? Absolutely. While Biden will work towards the same goal of deterring Beijing without emboldening Taipei, he will embrace different, more effective ways for achieving it.

Trump could not protect Taiwan’s international space because he purposefully reduced U.S. influence in international institutions. He pulled out of numerous international organizations and deals, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Paris Climate Agreement, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. So there was little that could be done when China forced Taipei out of the WHO’s World Health Assembly in 2017, where it had been an observer since a 2009 agreement. In 2020, China forced Taiwan’s exclusion even though its COVID-19 response was one of the most successful in the region, and condemnation from the State Department was largely ignored. Similarly, Taipei has also been kept at the margins of the United Nations Climate Change Conference since the United States left the Paris Agreement. And although entry into the TTP is a priority for Taiwanese leaders, Taipei lost its best path to joining without Washington to champion its candidacy.

Biden, as he has already shown through moves such as canceling Trump’s attempt to pull out of WHO, will be more involved in international institutions and strive to regain the United States’ global leadership role. This will give the United States more institutional power to advocate for Taipei’s inclusion and protect Taiwan’s international space better than the Trump administration’s unilateral efforts. Moreover, Biden is likely to reinstate the budgets for key U.S. organizations like USAID that Trump undermined and gutted. He also nominated a critic of the World Bank and IMF to oversee the U.S. role in both institutions. Reduced development aid and perceptions that American influence in the Pacific was declining have pushed countries toward China. In 2019, the Republic of Kiribati and the Solomon Islands both switched recognition from Taiwan to mainland China in exchange for multi-million dollar infrastructure deals.

A Biden administration will also work more with allies to meet the broader challenges China poses. The United States would not expect its security partners to play an integral role in any armed defense of Taiwan. But even the diplomatic support of other countries could go far in cautioning an increasingly confident Beijing.

In contrast, the Trump administration has relied mainly on unilateral options to enhance deterrence against the PRC, like freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs). These operations in which the U.S. navy sails through areas over which China has illegally declared sovereignty will likely continue under a Biden administration, but less frequently as he shifts to utilizing nonmilitary tools as well.

But the bigger change will be Biden’s tone. Trump has focused on provoking Beijing—using Taiwan as “an instrument of pushback against China.” Last month, a second high-level visit from a U.S. official to Taiwan within two months prompted China to fly 18 military aircraft across the sensitive midline on the Taiwan Strait, forcing Taipei to scramble fighter jets in response. The sale of F-16s was delayed because Trump was using it as a bargaining chip in trade deal negotiations with China.

Biden’s goal will not be to threaten Chinese interests for its own sake but to maintain the status quo across the Strait. For example, he has stated publicly that the United States should not come to Taiwan’s aid if Taiwan provokes war by declaring independence.

This more balanced approach will do much to reassure Beijing. Deterrence requires both reassurance and credible threats. The Trump administration has been effective at the former, signaling to Beijing that Washington is willing to defend Taiwan if necessary. But Washington must also avoid making Beijing believe that it will punish it no matter what, or else the United States loses the power to shape China’s potential use of force. Thus, reassuring Beijing that the United States is not attempting to change the status quo by encouraging Taiwanese independence is equally important. Hopefully, Biden will reinstate this balance.

FSI Center Fellow at APARC Oriana Skylar Mastro joins NPR's Weekend Edition host Scott Simon to discuss the rising tensions between China and Taiwan and how the United States should respond.

Listen to the complete interview below. This conversation originally appeared on NPR's website.

On a recent Friday afternoon at Stanford, the weather reminded me of some crisp yet clear winter days in Japan. The sun brightly lit the Falcon Lounge on the 5th floor of Encina Hall as six alumni from the 2014 to 2018 Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) and Sejong Korean Scholars Program (SKSP) cohorts gathered to celebrate the new year. This annual shinnenkai (literally, “new year gathering,” in Japanese) luncheon offers alumni of SPICE’s pre-collegiate online courses to meet or reconnect over lively conversation and delicious food. For the SPICE instructors, the shinnenkai is often the first time to meet alumni in person.

The RSP is an online course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations that is offered to U.S. high school students each spring, and will welcome its seventeenth cohort in a few weeks. The SKSP is preparing for its eighth cohort, and offers an intensive online study of Korea and U.S.–Korea relations to U.S. high school students. SPICE also offers a third online course to U.S. high school students on China and U.S.–China relations, the China Scholars Program. The CSP is preparing for its sixth cohort.

One of the attendees, James Noh (RSP ‘16, Stanford University ‘22), reflected on his RSP experience following the shinnenkai: “My RSP experience not only nurtured my interest in East Asia, but also made me realize that I wanted to incorporate my interest in East Asia into both my academic and professional careers. Looking back, I think participating in RSP played an important role in influencing my decision to take a gap year to study Mandarin in China after high school and major in international relations with a focus on East Asia.” During the shinnenkai, it was interesting to hear other alumni share thoughts on how their experiences in the RSP and SKSP helped to prepare them for and also shape their college life. Comments ranged from “informing choices” like class or major selection to “honing skills” like writing research papers.

Through the many years in which SPICE has engaged U.S. high school students in these intensive online courses, we have been fortunate to work with many exceptional students such as James. As the instructor of the RSP, I especially treasure the face-to-face opportunities to meet with alumni of these courses. These opportunities are rare treats given that our courses take place entirely online. The annual shinnenkai is truly a highlight of my year.

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