DPP using language distinctions to split Chinese nation: spokesperson

By deliberately differentiating the Chinese dialects used in Taiwan from Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authority is staging a poor melodrama to diminish the Taiwan people's acknowledgement of their place within the Chinese nation, a mainland spokesperson said Wednesday.

At a Wednesday press conference, Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, said that such attempts will lead nowhere.

Zhu made the remarks when commenting on the DPP authority labelling the Minnan dialect and other Chinese dialects widely used in Taiwan as "indigenous languages" in its laws, so as to differentiate them from Mandarin Chinese, which is used more on the mainland.

Some of the said dialects are, in fact, variants of the Chinese language, and were brought to Taiwan by ancient migrants from today's Guangdong and Fujian provinces, Zhu said.

"In China, a multi-ethnic country, it is only natural for ethnic minorities in Taiwan and on the mainland to have their own languages," she added.

Through cross-Strait exchanges, people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are bound to overcome the obstacles in communication, said Zhu, adding that the mainland will continue to facilitate people-to-people exchanges across the Strait.