Taiwan Church News

3375 Edition

October 31 - November 6, 2016

Church Ministry

Lin And Chen Dominate Aboriginal Surnames, A Historical Mishap Says Lawmaker

Reported by Chiu Kuo-rong

According to A Statistical Analysis About Taiwanese Surnames, an Interior Ministry report released on October 26,Lin and Chen ranked the first and second surnames of all Taiwanese aborigines. Against this finding, DPP lawmaker Ms Kolas Yokata criticized that it was a historical mishap for the aborigines to accept these Chinese surnames. The government should help the aborigines to restore their traditional names and save the aboriginal societies from a further cultural collapse due to a cunning colonialism behind the name game.

It is reported in this Interior Ministry's report that there are 57,340 aborigines, about 10.43% of the whole Taiwaneseaboriginal population, inherited or imposed a surname Lin which is a also a dominant surname in Han society. Except Nan-tou county's surname Chuang and Cha-yi county's surname Chueng, both are Han's surnames and dominate within the tribes at two counties, Lin and Chen are ranked the first and second surnames in the other 20 metropolis cities, counties, and cities across Taiwan.

Ms Yokata remarks that this is a historical mishap and should be rectified as soon as possible. The unfortunatefact, that the aborigines were imposed the surnames of Han, is a brutal law, named as Codes to Restore Traditional Names of the People in Taiwan Province, ordered by Taiwan Provincial Government in 1945; KMT officials in local governments used to to change the aboriginal surnames barbarously at will, causing a strange phenomenon that an aboriginal family possessed many surnames among the same family, says Yakota.

To amend the Name Act, now Ms Yokata is now engaged in restoring traditional names to the aborigines throughthe following three routes: 1) a phonetic transliteration by the Chinese characters along the aboriginal names on ID card ; 2) a Romanization of aboriginal names could be noted with the initially imposed Chinese names; 3) a simple Romanization of aboriginal names to be taken down on ID card. Option 3 had passed the first reading in the congress and quite hopeful to be legalized as a law within 6 to 8 months if some technical problems at the side of Interior Ministry could be solved soon.

Translated by Peter Wolfe