My Take | Much ethnic debate about nothing in Taiwan
If the island is an integral part of China, then obviously its indigenous people are Chinese too
According to Jorge Luis Borges, the ancient Chinese had a very simple system of taxonomy. There were all the animals that belonged to the emperor, and the rest.
To be fair, it was a little more complicated. There were further classifications under the latter “not-emperor’s” category: animals that look like flies, those that have recently broken an expensive vase, stray dogs, and suckling pigs (presumably mature pigs became the emperor’s property). Then there were untrained animals, embalmed ones, innumerable ones plus all those included in this classification, those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, fabled animals, et cetera.
Two further comments from me, and I will stop. This is one of those typical imaginative fantasies of Borges’ that set the mind alight with a thousand thoughts. It’s good he only wrote short stories. Imagine a long novel from him, it would literally blow your mind.
The “fabled ones” in the classification presumably included the legendary dragon. Does that mean dragons didn’t belong to the emperor? Also “et cetera”, as in other things, is itself an animal category.
Some readers initially thought Borges was serious. However, some Chinese thought his “in-joke” was racist and that he was making fun of our culture. I don’t know if he was. But I have always found it funny, and much more.
Anyway, Borges’ little flight of fancy came to mind when I recently read about a controversy between some Taiwanese secessionists and Japanese ethnographers, over mainland China’s classification of ethnic minorities, of which there are 55 plus the Han majority.
