Minister of the Overseas Community Affairs Council Stephen Chen says that Taiwan’s efforts to promote the Chinese language overseas have been a success.
Chen was speaking at the legislature on Wednesday. Chen said Taiwan-sponsored Chinese language centers have continued to perform well. That’s despite growing competition from Mainland China’s Confucius Institute, which plans to open 500 new centers and 1,000 new classrooms abroad by the end of the year.
Chen told legislators the number of Taiwan-affiliated schools is growing as well, with new schools planned for the San Francisco Bay Area, Paris, and Vancouver. Chen said these schools play an important role in promoting the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan.
"We have our own educational centers overseas," said Chen. "There are also around 60 pro-Taiwanese educational organizations overseas, and we enjoy close ties with more than 1,000 Chinese language schools. The vast majority of these schools promote traditional characters, so we still have quite a bit of traction in the market for learning traditional characters."
The promotion of traditional characters is an important goal for Taiwan’s Chinese teaching institutes abroad. Taiwan, along with Hong Kong and Macau, has continued to use the traditional form of Chinese characters, whereas Chinese speakers on the Mainland use a simplified set of characters which were introduced in 1956.